When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut had some great stuff. He famously warned people away from the use of semicolons by describing them “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.”
Eight years before his passing, Vonnegut published a collection of short stories titled “Bagombo Snuff Box.” The book was made up of previously published short fiction from his early (and short) career from the 1950s writing for magazines. These works did not appear in Vonnegut’s previous collection, “Welcome to the Monkey House.”
In the introduction, he laid down his eight rules as Creative Writing 101:
Now lend me your ears. Here is 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 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.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer. His works such as Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association. The New York Times headline at the time of Vonnegut’s passing called Vonnegut “the counterculture’s novelist.” [from Wikipedia HERE]
You can get a copy of Bagombo Snuff Box from Amazon, HERE.