vonnegut creative writing 101

Kurt Vonnegut on Creative Writing

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., one of American literature’s foremost satirists, published 14 novels between 1952 and 1997, including his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five . In his introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box , a collection of his early short fiction, he offered aspiring writers what he described as “Creative Writing 101” in the form of eight rules. Here they are:

• 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 heck 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.

But such rules, as Vonnegut acknowledges, can and should be broken – just ask Agatha Christie! “The greatest American short story writer of my generation,” he concludes, “was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”

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Kurt Vonnegut’s Greatest Writing Advice

"literature should not disappear up its own asshole," and other craft imperatives.

Today, if you can believe it, makes it ten years since we lost one of the greatest American writers—and, no matter how he tried to deny it, one of the greatest writing teachers. Certainly one of the greatest writing advice list-makers, at any rate. Vonnegut’s many thoughts on writing have been widely shared, taught, studied and adapted (designer Maya Eilam’s infographic-ized version of his “shapes of stories” lecture springs vividly to mind) because his advice tends to be straightforward, generous, and (most importantly) right .

Plus, it’s no-nonsense advice with a little bit of nonsense. Like his books, really. Find some of Vonnegut’s greatest writing advice, plucked from interviews, essays, and elsewhere, below—but first, find some of Vonnegut’s greatest life advice right here: “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” Okay, proceed.

On proper punctuation:

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. (From A Man Without a Country )

On having other interests:

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak. (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review )

On the value of writing:

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. (From A Man Without a Country )

On the theory of teaching creative writing:

I don’t have the will to teach anymore. I only know the theory… It was stated by Paul Engle—the founder of the Writers Workshop at Iowa. He told me that, if the workshop ever got a building of its own, these words should be inscribed over the entrance: “Don’t take it all so seriously.” (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review )

I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there’s an admirable practical joke for you. When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do. You can also exclude the reader by not telling him immediately where the story is taking place, and who the people are [and what they want].

And you can put him to sleep by never having characters confront each other. Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. “Modern life is so lonely,” they say. This is laziness. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can’t or won’t do that, he should withdraw from the trade. (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review )

On not selling anything:

I used to teach a writer’s workshop at the University of Iowa back in the 1960s, and I would say at the start of every semester, “The role model for this course is Vincent van Gogh—who sold two paintings to his brother.” (Laughs.) I just sit and wait to see what’s inside me, and that’s the case for writing or for drawing, and then out it comes. There are times when nothing comes. James Brooks, the fine abstract-expressionist, I asked him what painting was like for him, and he said, “I put the first stroke on the canvas and then the canvas has to do half the work.” That’s how serious painters are. They’re waiting for the canvas to do half the work. (Laughs.) Come on. Wake up. (From The Last Interview )

On love in fiction:

So much of what happens in storytelling is mechanical, has to do with the technical problems of how to make a story work. Cowboy stories and policeman stories end in shoot-outs, for example, because shoot-outs are the most reliable mechanisms for making such stories end. There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: “The end.” I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers. (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review )

On a good work schedule:

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours. (From an interview with Robert Taylor in Boston Globe Magazine , 1969)

On “how to write with style,” aka List #1:

1. Find a subject you care about Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way—although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though I won’t ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

4. Have guts to cut It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

5. Sound like yourself The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable—and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

7. Pity the readers They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school—twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify—whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

8. For really detailed advice For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style , by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say. (From “ How to Write With Style, ” published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ journal Transactions on Professional Communications in 1980.)

On how to write good short stories, aka List #2:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. 3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. 4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. 5. Start as close to the end as possible. 6. 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. 7. 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. 8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck 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.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that. (From the preface to Bagombo Snuff Box )

On ignoring rules:

And there, I’ve just used a semi-colon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules. (From A Man Without a Country )

On the shapes of stories:

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Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Basic Rules Of Creative Writing

As craft nerds here at Writing Workshops , we love writing advice and we love Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 basics of Creative Writing. These come from the preface to his story collection Bagombo Snuff Box :

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 heck 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.

Vonnegut said the greatest American short story writer of his generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). He said she broke every one of his rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that. And all great writers had to start somewhere. If you’re thinking about joining a community of writers, check out our classes (In-Person & Online) in Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Screenwriting via the button below.

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Advice from Kurt Vonnegut that Every Writer Needs to Read

By Fred Johnson

I can give you professional writing advice until the cows come home, but at the end of the day, I’m not a bestselling author or a member of America’s literary canon. You know who is? Kurt Vonnegut, that’s who.

Kurt Vonnegut, author of such classics as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions , stands today as one of the 20th century’s most important American writers. I can’t think of anyone better placed to give literary advice, and, thankfully, he agreed with me.

These eight tips were originally written by Vonnegut to apply exclusively to writers of short stories, but I reckon they’re just as useful for writers of longer fiction. Here they are:

There are Exceptions!

1. "use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.".

This one seems simple: your reader (a total stranger) must not feel like they’re wasting time wading through unnecessary details, events, or descriptions—they must feel constantly engaged. If you give them an excuse to get up and wander off, they’ll do it.

This tip is about keeping your story focused. Your plot must be structured in such a way that the central conflict is always in view (here’s more on how to structure your plot ). Even tangential storylines need to be relevant.

2. "Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for."

This helps to keep readers engaged and on-side. Unsurprisingly, if everyone in your book is repellent, the reader will be repelled!

If a reader likes even one character in your story, they will feel invested in what happens to that character. This keeps them engaged and keeps them reading.

Who would have made it through all seven Harry Potter books if Harry, Ron, and Hermione were all insufferable brats?

3. "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water."

This one is HUGE. Too often in short stories and novels, as well as on TV and in films, you see characters who arrive solely to fill some plot hole or who do nothing other than complement the protagonist.

For example, I was editing a fantasy novel recently where a new monster with some new adventurer-defeating ability would appear intermittently, only to be thwarted by some new arrival who would turn up unannounced, cast a magic spell to defeat the monster, and then disappear, never to be heard from again.

Why did he turn up? Who was he? What did he hope to gain by attacking this monster that wasn’t troubling him?

Your characters, even if they are monsters, should be believable as people—they should all have hopes, dreams, motives… even if that motive is, as Vonnegut says, a glass of water.

George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is good for this. All of his characters have established motives that justify their horrible actions: Arya wants revenge on those who’ve wronged her family, Cersei wants to protect her children and exercise her power, and Hot Pie wants to make nice pastries.

4. "Every sentence must do one of two things: reveal character or advance the action."

This is particularly true for short stories but is also something to remember for novels. No line should be wasted—you have to be ruthless with your prose. Don’t be afraid to prune and hack whole sentences off. After all, if you don’t, your editor will!

For example, sometimes I’ll see descriptive paragraphs overloaded with flowery prose:

• Steven walked slowly and quietly into the kitchen. The units were glossy white and the worktop was a speckled grey. Behind the silver sink, seven small potted plants lined the window sill and brilliant sunshine weaved through the emerald green leaves, casting shadows on the patterned linoleum floor.

Now, as a descriptive paragraph this certainly conjures a vivid picture, but the writer should ask himself/herself what exactly such description is achieving. Is the kitchen a significant space in the plot? Do we really need to know about the units, the worktop, or the potted plants? Can we really justify two adverbs?

If the answer to these questions is no, the paragraph could be much improved:

• Steven crept into the kitchen.

In a short story, that’s probably enough.

5. "Start as close to the end as possible."

I was surprised by this one, but it makes sense. Short stories often fail through biting off more than they can chew. A good short story is intimate, limited in scope, and detailed in its characters, settings, and events.

Take John Cheever’s 'Reunion' as an example. It starts only a few hours from the end and focuses on only two characters in a few bars.

The story follows the narrator as he meets his estranged father for a drink, but the narrator’s father gets the pair kicked out of every bar they visit by being abusive to waiters. The story ends when they run out of time and don’t get to enjoy a drink together after all. The narrator goes to catch his train, leaves his father shouting at a newsagent, and is borne away. The story ends with the incredibly potent line: “and that was the last time I saw my father.”

6. "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."

Every story needs an "all is lost" moment (or several!).TV audiences everywhere have learned the power of sadism through Game of Thrones, but this kind of cruelty isn’t exclusive to George R.R. Martin.

Terrible events make for good drama, and suffering serves to render characters vulnerable—and, as any good writer knows, it is only when a person is vulnerable that they can truly be known.

7. "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."

This tip is even more important today than it was in Vonnegut’s time. It’s about writing for yourself or for one person— never write for the sake of following a trend . As Strunk and White wrote in Elements of Style :

• Start sniffing at the air, or glancing at the trend machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.

Don’t be a sellout—write true, and write for yourself.

8. "Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck 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."

This is perhaps a surprising tip, and one that might not be suitable for writers of thrillers or horror fiction, but providing information aids in world-building, helps render events and characters believable, and, perhaps most importantly, will make any plot holes or instances of deus ex machina glaringly clear.

Of course, some trailblazers can get away with ignoring all of these tips—Kurt had this to say of Flannery O’Connor:

• The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor. She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

Well, back to the drawing board then.

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Fred Johnson

Fred Johnson is an editor for Standout Books, where he helps authors take their manuscripts from good to perfect. In his spare time he writes bad poetry and worries about the future.

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Creative Writing 101 — Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules for Writing Fiction

I’ve recently become a fan of reading collections of letters (a form which is disappearing now that we don’t write letters much anymore), and I read a recommendation somewhere to read Kurt Vonnegut’s letters .

From there, I was drawn to a collection of his short fiction, named—paradoxically— Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction .

In the Introduction, Vonnegut provides his rules for “Creative Writing 101.”

• 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.

However, Vonnegut notes, “The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor…She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”

I’m a Flannery O’Connor freak , so I was very happy to see that Vonnegut loved her work, too. In fact, in a weird synchronicity, it was my admiration for O’Connor’s collection of letters, The Habit of Being , that got me reading letters in the first place.

What do you think of these rules?

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project —an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home . On her popular blog, The Happiness Project , she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter .

*Photo Credit: bluinfaccia via Compfight cc

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8 Creative Writing Tips from Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's stories and prose are so memorably witty.  If you haven't read such classics as  Cat’s Cradle ,  Breakfast Of Champions , and  Slaughterhouse Five, you have pleasant surprises awaiting you!  And his advice on writing is just as memorable as his stories. Here are Vonnegut's 8 basics of  "Creative Writing 101:"

• 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 heck 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.

Vonnegut goes on to praise Flannery O’Connor as the greatest writer of his generation, saying, "She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that."

What's your favorite bit of writing or screenwriting advice?  Who's your favorite writer?  Let us know in the comments below or on  Twitter .

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Creative Writing 101 from ...

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Creative Writing 101 from Kurt Vonnegut

By Lou Hoffman

While many of the same concepts apply to storytelling in business, there’s still a gulf between the two disciplines.

But Sarah Lafferty pointed me to a book of Kurt Vonnegut short stories published after his death. The introduction includes what Vonnegut calls “Creative Writing 101,” which offers sound advice for storytellers of all ilk:

1.Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. 3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. 4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. 5. Start as close to the end as possible. 6. 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. 7. 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. 8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck 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.

Yes, Mr. Vonnegut can write even when he’s pulling together storytelling tips for us mortals.

I particularly like No. 6 and the point that “no matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them.”

The beauty of storytelling in business is you don’t have to fabricate “awful things” to confront executives. They happen on their own … as the President of Toyota Akio Toyoda will attest .

Instead, the question for communications professionals becomes how much to disclose.

The standard company line is always “little if any.”

The suits are linear thinkers; i.e., the word “awful” brings a negative connotation and we don’t want the company associated with negatives.

But it’s your executive or executives overcoming the bad stuff – even things that might have been self induced – which in turn creates the drama of a good story.

As Vonnegut puts it, how your characters respond to the “awful things” allow the reader to “see what they are made of.”

So it is in the business world.

Your customers, employees and prospects want to see what you’re made of.

Sarah Lafferty

Lou, thanks very much for recognising my favourite author in your blog. I wanted to add that Kurt Vonnegut did PR for General Electric before he became a famous writer so there’s early proof that great storytelling and PR go hand in hand.

Lou Hoffman

I didn’t know that Mr. Vonnegut worked in PR (trying to picture him counseling Jack Welch on how to handle an earnings call).

Vonnegut shares this trait with J.D. Salinger who also experienced the world of public relations while in the Army.

Storytelling Narrative Brands: A look at this week's stories

[…] Creative Writing 101 from Kurt Vonnegut Lou Hoffman shares some storytelling wisdom from one of the masters. Cord at Capstrat is a Vonn fan too. […]

Michael Margolis

This is awesome Lou. Vonnegut always had the ability to get to the nub of it, with humor and genuine wit. Thanks for sharing these great storytelling reflections!

I love #3 – “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” I’m thirsty…

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Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tenets of Storytelling

By maria popova.

Now comes Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922–April 11, 2007) — anarchist , Second Life dweller , imaginary interviewer of the dead , sad soul — with eight tips on how to write a good short story, narrated by the author himself.

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.

Complement with Vonnegut on the shapes of stories , the secret of happiness , his daily routine , and his life-advice to his children , then dive into this evolving omnibus of famous writers’ collected advice on the craft .

— Published April 3, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/04/03/kurt-vonnegut-on-writing-stories/ —

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31 Writing Lessons From Iconic Author Kurt Vonnegut

With his deceptively simple prose style, novelist, playwright and essayist Kurt Vonnegut, jr. (1922 – 2007) bridged sci-fi and literary fiction. Novels like Slaughterhouse-Five,  Cat’s Cradle and  Breakfast of Champions  didn’t exactly open readers to new worlds as new ways of thinking.

Perhaps this is why Vonnegut has rarely been adapted to film, and even rarely adapted successfully. George Roy Hill directed a SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE film in 1972 from a script by Stephen Geller.

Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead  bought the rights to The Sirens of Titan in 1983, only later confessing that this was partly to prevent it from being made into a bad film. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions has been developing Cat’s Cradle  for several years.

Still, Kurt Vonnegut’s unique creativity and philosophical viewpoint is very valuable for screenwriters. These lessons for writers, drawn from his fiction and non-fiction, reveal Vonnegut as a sharp observer of human nature and all of its existential absurdities.

Below are 31 lessons from Kurt Vonnegut for writers, filmmakers , and storytellers…

Kurt Vonnegut lessons

1 “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ―  If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

Writing is an act of courage. It can feel like jumping off a cliff, but that’s when your survival mechanism kicks in.

2 “The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practising an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” ― A Man Without a Country

A sobering thought, but one that’s sadly often necessary. So many writers will never make a living from their writing. The key is to find a way to still feel creatively fulfilled.

3 “Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.”

Seize opportunities where- and when-ever they arise. Make the most of every moment, whether that’s researching, outlining, writing, or networking. On the other hand, if you don’t make your target for today, this week, month, or even year, wallowing in regret serves no purpose. Learn to move on.

4 “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

It’s reassuring to realise that even a great writer like Vonnegut feels daunted by the blank page!

5 “Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out.”

It’s often impossible to narrow the source of an idea down to a single thing which is why Kurt Vonnegut and so many writers find this question frustrating. Writers have to be open to the world as inspiration can strike from anywhere and everywhere.

6 “I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did’.” ― Timequake

Kurt Vonnegut knew the value of popular art, as his cameo in the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School  demonstrates. Don’t turn up your nose at popular books, music, TV shows and movies. If these are what help people appreciate their lives, there’s tremendous value in that.

7 “Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?” ― A Man Without a Country

At the same time, stories don’t always have to be upbeat to be popular. Stories also allow us to commiserate and to realise that we are not alone in our problems.

8 “Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”

9 “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” ―  Hocus Pocus

How often have you heard that “writing is rewriting”? It’s the commitment to making a script the best it can be that will help you stand out as a writer.

10 “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” ― Bagombo Snuff Box

Actors ask “What’s my motivation?” for good reason. Wanting something, even if it’s a basic survival need, is a fundamental character trait.

11 “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.” ― Bagombo Snuff Box 

12 “There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organisation. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organised along the lines of the Mafia.” ― The Sirens of Titan

It can be tempting to write a depressing, downbeat ending, as if that’s more realistic. However, this is not necessarily the case.

13 “profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.” ― Hocus Pocus

Sometimes it’s difficult to reach beyond an audience that already agrees with you. Writers can smuggle their ideas in innocent packages (ZOOTOPIA, for example).

14 “Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.”

Are there really only seven types of story? Or just one? Storytelling is as old as civilisation itself. You can learn a great deal from storytelling theory through the ages, from Aristotle’s Poetics to Joseph Campbell.

15 “No art is possible without a dance with death.” 

16 “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” 

17 “I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.” ― Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage 

18 “Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.” 

19 ““simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions…” ―  Bluebeard

20 “I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.” ―  Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

The same could very well be said about films and screenwriters. Having a real life to draw from is essential!

21 “Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.” ― Cat’s Cradle 

22 “Don’t put one foot in your job and the other in your dream, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It’s just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you’ve made up your mind which way to go.” ― Player Piano

23 “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.” ― Bagombo Snuff Box

24 “I’m simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming. I’m startled that I became a writer.” 

25 “If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.”  ―  Deadeye Dick 

26 “It shook up Trout to realise that even he could bring evil into the world — in the form of bad ideas.”  ―  Breakfast of Champions  

(Kurt Vonnegut often used the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, writer of cheap sci-fi novels, as a stand-in for himself.)

27 “I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read the greatest American short story, which is ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,’ by Ambrose Bierce.”

28 “We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.” 

29 “If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think nearly as well as you think you do.” 

30 “Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.” ― Bluebeard

31 “I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.” ― Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

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1 thought on “31 Writing Lessons From Iconic Author Kurt Vonnegut”

I do agree with all of the ideas you’ve presented in your post. They are very convincing and will certainly work. Still, the posts are very short for starters. Could you please extend them a bit from next time? Thanks for the post.

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Vonnegut’s best advice to writers: 8 tips revisited

The great writer Kurt Vonnegut’s best advice to writers, the 8 ‘rules’ reprinted in his story collection Bagombo Snuff Box (1999), has been shared often. Read Vonnegut’s creative writing tips below. We ask: Are they good rules?

• Post author By Jordan
• 4 Comments on Vonnegut’s best advice to writers: 8 tips revisited

The great writer Kurt Vonnegut’s best advice to writers, the 8 ‘rules’ reprinted in his story collection Bagombo Snuff Box  (1999), has been shared often. Read Vonnegut’s creative writing tips below. We ask: Are they good rules?

First: Who is Kurt Vonnegut?

If you aren’t familiar with Vonnegut’s writing, Kurt Vonnegut Jr (November 11, 1922 to April 11, 2007) was a prolific American author and (later in his career) lecturer in creative writing at Harvard University. In total, Vonnegut wrote and published fourteen novels, three short story collections, and five non-fiction books during a career that lasted over 50 years. His fame was cemented only after he published his sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five , in 1969. The satirical book about the follies of World War II became a New York Times bestseller and thrust Vonnegut into the spotlight.

Re-examining Vonnegut’s best advice to writers, his ‘Creative Writing 101’

In the introduction to the collection of short stories Bagombo Snuff Box , Vonnegut writes:

‘Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck 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. ‘

Let’s look closer at each of these instructions. Are they helpful as guides to writing?

Writing tip 1: Don’t waste a stranger’s (i.e. reader’s) time

This is fairly vague and broad advice. If you describe your character’s face or abode in exquisite detail, one reader might feel you’ve wasted their time while another might be enthralled. There is a core of truth here, though: Choose what to tell the reader wisely. Just as in a conversation you’d try to leave out the boring parts, do the same in your writing. Some ways to make sure you don’t waste readers’ time:

• Know the purpose of each scene in your story. You should be able to summarise it in a single sentence. This will keep you focused on core story events
• Know your audience: If you’re writing for thriller lovers, for example, keep philosophical, literary ramblings to a minimum
• Join a writing group and get helpful feedback  – readers will let you know if you’ve wasted their time, giving you plenty of insight for revision

Writing tip 2: Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for

Vonnegut’s writing advice is sound here. To win over readers, there needs to be connection. If your characters are universally contemptible and unpleasant, you could still write a gripping or interesting book, though. If the style and content of your story is interesting, full of tension and drama and incident, some readers may overlook the fact there isn’t a particularly relateable character in the story. This works for writers of so-called ‘transgressive fiction’ such as Bret Easton Ellis.

Also remember that a character the reader can root for doesn’t have to be perfect. Great characters have flaws for two reasons:

• Flaws make characters more believable (since most people have them)
• Flaws are a source of inner conflict in your story . Inner conflict creates the desire to keep reading, since readers will want to find out whether your character prevails or crumbles.

Writing tip 3: Make every character want something

This is arguably some of Vonnegut’s best advice to writers. Character motivations drive a story. When characters share goals (as the adventuring party does in Lord of the Rings , for instance), you can show how the bonds of friendship form as well as the intimacy, affection and humour between people collaborating around a shared objective.

When characters want opposing things, however, there is opportunity for conflict and magnificent rivalry and tension. This could be the conflict between siblings who want the lion’s share of their parents’ attention or fortune (as in Shakespeare’s King Lear ) or it could be the opposition between a tyrant’s desire for world domination and the desire for freedom from tyranny that drives a hero’s journey.

The many possibilities for affect and suspense-building tension contained within character motivation makes it wise to outline each character’s central story goals when you outline your novel.

Writing tip 4: Make every sentence reveal character or advance action

Vonnegut’s fourth piece of writing advice is questionable. Of course steady advance in action makes a story interesting. And character revelation deepens how we understand and relate to story characters. Sometimes there are whole, good paragraphs that do neither, however.

Setting description, for example, can help to establish mood and tone for a scene or chapter. This is often necessary because without these cues, a story might lack a strong sense of contrast and place, becoming drab. The Lord of the Rings would be much less epic in scope and feel if it weren’t for descriptions such as the following of Mordor :

‘The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomitted the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.’

In short, every sentence should simply be good. It should contribute character insight, a gripping sense of action or place, mood and affect.

Writing tip 5: Start as close to the end as possible

Many stories start long before the end. Especially multi-volume series. C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series starts with British children discovering the mythical world of Narnia and later portrays them as grown adults living in the same world. So start wherever you like.

If you were writing a murder mystery, for example, you could start from the days leading up to the event or the moment the act is committed. You could start with detectives investigating the scene after the event. You could even start from the moment the killer’s sentence is handed down, though, and work your way backwards to show what led to these circumstances.

What Vonnegut’s writing advice here gets at, though, is that a good story doesn’t have a long-winded preamble. It’s not as important that you start close to the end as it is important that you elicit curiosity from the start.

Writing tip 6: Make awful things happen to your characters so the reader can see what they’re made of

Vonnegut’s writing advice to be sadistic to your characters is useful to a point. Even books for young readers often have dark, subversive elements (the books of Roald Dahl are a good example). This is because seeing characters struggle against adversity we can relate to our own challenges. We can learn from characters’ trials.

We can (and should) learn what characters are made of through the good things too, however. Vonnegut appears to suggest that it is in adversity specifically that we see what people are made of. But success can be revealing too. One person who becomes extremely wealthy, for example, might withdraw and become paranoid and obsessive about guarding their wealth. Another might become philanthropic and generous. It all depends on how you frame what happens to your characters (and how they frame their own experiences). What separates the choices of the example characters above is most likely how they frame their wealth and the stories they tell themselves about it to rationalize their behaviour.

In short, awful things and good things are both interesting and can illustrate character when you show the different ways characters in your story frame the same event.

Writing tip 7: Write to please just one person

Vonnegut makes a good point, that you can’t please every single reader. If you do write to please just one person, you could make that person yourself. When you write the story you’ve always wanted to read ( as Toni Morrison advises ), there’s a good chance someone out there has always wanted to read that story too.

What Vonnegut’s writing advice here doesn’t touch on is the idea of audience. If you’re writing in a specific genre, there may be a specific type of reader your book will appeal to. But there is also the general audience for that genre. Most readers of thrillers, romances, and other genres will expect certain genre conventions (or be wary of genre clichés that are overused). Know your genre and your audience, and plan ways to surprise them with new twists on classic tropes.

Writing tip 8: Give readers as much information as you can as early as possible

This, again, is dubious advice. There are many ways to tell a story. If your style and your prose and your characters are all interesting, readers might easily forgive a more teasing, elliptical approach. This all depends on your genre too – a mystery novel will naturally leave more for the slow reveal than a straightforward romantic comedy will.

The latter part of Vonnegut’s eighth point is good advice, though. Give readers the information they need to understand where they are in the story, so that they can grasp both the place and purpose of every scene. Outlining your novel and making sure it fits together as a cohesive whole will go a long way towards this.

Vonnegut himself acknowledged that his ‘creative writing 101’ was provisional; that great writers break the rules. Immediately after his 8 rules, he writes:

‘The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.’

So remember (whenever you read writing rules) to ask questions and decide for yourself how relevant and helpful the rule is for your own writing practice.

Outlining (as a rule) works. It gives you a guiding plan for your story that can be as flexible as you choose. Start creating a helpful blueprint for your story on Now Novel and finish writing a book.

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• Tags Kurt Vonnegut , writing advice

Jordan is a writer, editor, community manager and product developer. He received his BA Honours in English Literature and his undergraduate in English Literature and Music from the University of Cape Town.

4 replies on “Vonnegut’s best advice to writers: 8 tips revisited”

These are great tips and I believe in them completely. I wish all authors did (at least genre authors).

Which is your favourite? Thanks for weighing in, Lexa.

To me, 2 & 3 are the most important. And I admit I may be a bit too gleeful in doing 6. 😉

3 is important, I agree. A source of glee in writing is a helpful thing to have 🙂

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8 memorable creative writing tips by kurt vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut, a novelist and satirist with a penchant for dishing out memorable writing advice, gave us equally memorable and witty novels and prose in a career spanning over 50 years.

If you haven’t read such classics as  Cat’s Cradle ,  Breakfast Of Champions , and  Slaughterhouse Five , you have pleasant surprises awaiting you in his work! He was a master of his craft.

In the introduction to his 1999 collection of magazine stories, Bagombo Snuff Box , stories written during the fifties and sixties for such popular venues as The Saturday Evening Post, Vonnegut put down his advice on how to write a good short story with his customary wisdom and wit.

Here are Vonnegut’s 8 basics of what he called “Creative Writing 101:”

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a "sadist" [when writing]. 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.

7. 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.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck 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.

But for every rule (well, almost every rule) there is an exception. Vonnegut goes on to praise Flannery O’Connor as the greatest writer of his generation, saying, “She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”

What’s your favorite bit of this writing advice? Let us know in the comments below or on  Twitter .

See Also: David Ogilvy’s 10 Tips to Write Well .

View the discussion thread.

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Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories and 8 Basics of Creative Writing

This is one that I'm sure most of the writers on reddit have seen, but it's worth a rehash nonetheless. The best place to start on Vonnegut's shapes of stories, I think, is from the man himself, so here he is talking about his literary theory in video format .

If you don't like to watch videos (I don't either, but you should watch this one. It's short, and he's a great speaker.), you can check out this long infographic with the same information.

And finally, I'll leave you with Vonnegut's eight basics of creative writing. For everyone who hates the structures, models, and rules I've been posting, I think it's especially important to pay attention to Vonnegut's addendum after rule eight. Here they are:

Kurt Vonnegut created some of the most outrageously memorable novels of our time, such as Cat's Cradle , Breakfast Of Champions , and Slaughterhouse Five . His work is a mesh of contradictions: both science fiction and literary, dark and funny, classic and counter-culture, warm-blooded and very cool. And it's all completely unique.

With his customary wisdom and wit, Vonnegut put forth 8 basics of what he calls Creative Writing 101:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck 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.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

From the preface to Vonnegut's short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box.

Further advice for beginners (All links go to self posts on r/writing ):

China Miéville on Novel Structure for Beginners

Neil Gaiman's Advice for Beginners

Dan Harmon's Story Structure 101: Super Basic Shit

Blake Snyder's Save the Cat Beat Sheet

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Kurt Vonnegut: 8 Basics of Creative Writing

Kurt Vonnegut created some of the most outrageously memorable novels of our time, such as Cat's Cradle , Breakfast Of Champions , and Slaughterhouse Five . His work is a mesh of contradictions: both science fiction and literary, dark and funny, classic and counter-culture, warm-blooded and very cool. And it's all completely unique.

With his customary wisdom and wit, Vonnegut put forth 8 basics of what he calls Creative Writing 101:

• 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 heck 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.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

From the preface to Vonnegut's short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box.

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