The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling

said that Buddhists are naturally fans of science fiction. Why? Once again, because philosophy, Buddhism, and science fiction at their best (as well as science itself) challenge our views and transform our perception.

It is all one piece, this writing life, and each activity—professional and personal—enriches the others. Everything flows from the same source—the love of art. All art.

I practice my Choy Li Fut empty-hand and weapons kung fu sets and tai chi chuan sets with old friends I’ve trained with since 1981 (since my early twenties I have believed in the traditional Japanese concept of bunburyodo—also favored by the writer Yukio Mishima—which literally means “the pen and the sword in accord,” literary and martial arts toge

which thought is tabernacled.

Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness.

Percy Shelley in “A Defense of Poetry,”

“If a writer presents only one side of a problem, one meaning in exclusion to all the others, then that writer is guilty of oversimplification, one-dimensionality, a lack of depth, and an act of violence to the phenomenon itself. He has denied its richness, scaled down the possibilities of being, frozen the process of meaning at a single fixed poin

Crafting language takes time, because writing well is exactly the same thing as thinking well, and that requires time to rethink one’s options and alternatives at every moment in a prose passage.

When

Character, then, is the engine of plot, and over the years I’ve come at the creation of characters from a few different angles: (1) basing them on an idea or principle; (2) drawing them from real people, specific individuals (or several) as my model for a character; (3) basing them on myself; and (4) basing them on the biography of a historical fig