I was browsing through Foliate Oak Literary Magazine and saw these 'Kurt Vonnegut Writing Tips':
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
It's not very different from how one would live their lives, is it?
Or that's what I'd say to you: Don't fucking waste my time.
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
It's not very different from how one would live their lives, is it?
Or that's what I'd say to you: Don't fucking waste my time.
I read these too, after reading S5, not that long ago. My uber-authority, Wiki, says: "Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O'Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that...."
ReplyDeleteOh, I think they rewrite the rules. altogether more interesting. when i wrote this post though, i was thinking how nice it would be if the people we deal with in life could, well, learn something from this. don't you think?
ReplyDeletePicasso once said that in order to paint the way the did, which was breaking all the rules, he had to know all the rules first. I agree. Be sure you know what the rules are and are expert at using them, then feel free to break them.
ReplyDelete