Kurt Vonnegut Rules for Authors

In his Friday email, Harry Bingham gives his views on Kurt Vonnegut’s rules.

Harry is founder and CEO of Jericho Writers.

Harry Bingham

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

That rule, I think, is bomb-proof. And, in fact, I’d make it a little stricter. I think that even high-end literary fiction has to entertain. It can’t be enough that I have a sense of having done my duty by the Gods of Literature. I need to have had fun – or have been moved – or basically just liked my experience with the book. I think entertainment is core. I’ve never knowingly broken that rule, not even writing non-fiction.

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

I’ve never broken that rule either, but I think it’s probably possible to break it effectively. American Psycho is a yukky book, but it’s a work of proper genius … and its genius isn’t because its protagonist likes home-baking, cat rescue and volunteering at church-run soup kitchens. That said, it’s not even 1% of books that can break that rule effectively. So as a general guide, I’m with you, Kurt.

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

Every character? I don’t know. If your protagonist has a momentary interaction with a receptionist, say, then does the receptionist need obvious motivation? On the one hand, no: truly minor characters can simply fall off the table of things you have to think about. On the other hand, here’s a snippet where Fiona does in fact interact extremely briefly with a receptionist – at a modern, ultra-secure, psychiatric institution for very violent, very dangerous offenders. (Fiona is the key character in Harry’s thrillers.)

The driver takes us in. Hands us over to a neat, blue-suited receptionist – Alys, to go by her fabric badge. She is almost blushingly young, a late teenager at a guess. She wears a tri-coloured scarf, like a seriously out-of-place air stewardess.

‘Inspector Rogers? Miss Griffiths? Etta is expecting you.’

The ‘Etta’ in question is, I assume Dr. Etta Gulleford, the hospital director, and the woman we’re here to see.

No badges, I think because the metal clips could make a weapon. Instead, plastic cards, like the key-cards they use in hotels.

‘Upstairs. Right on to the end. Julie-Ann will find you there.’

She does a crinkle-eyed smile at us, the sort you’d get at an upmarket spa.

There’s no obvious sense of desire there, of wanting something … but on the other hand, I think there probably IS something. She’s blushingly young. She wears a scarf like an out-of-place stewardess. And she offers Fiona a spa-quality, crinkle-eyed smile.

What does all that amount to? I think it amounts to the Alys very much wanting Fiona not to make a fuss. Not to do something that breaks the spell. And the spell is, effectively, that this place can be considered like a nice, posh, modern spa rather than a quasi-prison full of extremely dangerous men. It’s like Alys is saying – pleading – don’t call this out for what it really is.

So, OK, I’m going to go with Vonnegut on this one. Even extremely minor characters should have some kind of want, even if it’s undeclared, even if it’s trivial.

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

That’s probably mostly true, but it can’t be quite literally true. I think that, in the passage I just quoted, every sentence does do one of those two things. But what about this:

We watch for a while. The gulls. The waves. The rolling print of the wind on the water. Stippling squalls that turn the sea’s smooth watercolour into something jumpy and agitated, like the surface has been rubbed with gorse.

That’s not really advancing any action and it doesn’t really tell us much about Fiona, except I suppose glancingly, in the sense that the way she expresses what she sees would be different from yours or mine. But really, the point about those lines is that they describe something – they reveal the character of a place, not a person. That’s fine with me. I expect Kurt wouldn’t have a fight with me over lines like that. I like description. It’s fine.

Start as close to the end as possible.

Vonnegut thought a lot about short stories and I think this rule applies both to short stories and to scenes. Enter late. It’s really easy to write 200 words of intro before you get to the meat of a scene. It’s often better to start with the meat, then use just 20-30 words a few paragraphs in to explain to the reader how they got to where they now are.

But does this rule make sense for novels? Don’t think so – or at least, I don’t think that it’s especially useful. Most of my Fiona novels start with a corpse discovery. Yes, that’s as close to the end “as possible”, but really: it’s right at the start. So: useful rule for scenes. Silly rule for books.

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.

Oh yes. Definitely. No quibbles here.

Here at Jericho Writers, we occasionally get books that tell a story such as: middle aged woman divorces cheating husband, feels a lack of purpose, gets diagnosed with cancer, takes up pottery, makes great ceramics, meets dashing ceramicist, gets the cancer all clear.

And, yeah, OK. I mean: in an actual person’s life, that’s all bad (to start with) then heart-warming (to end with.) But we all know people with stories like that. And – readers don’t care. They want really bad stuff to happen to characters. They’re sadists. So you have to be too. That’s just how it is.

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.

Yes. I agree with that. (It’s also, by the way, an exceptionally good rule for marketing books too. Sell hard to your ideal reader. Bore the rest. Ignore the rest.)

But I think it’s not clear enough. Who is that person? In the end, there’s only one person who matters and that’s you. Every line you write, every word choice you make, you’re just asking the question: do I like this? Or that? Which pleases me more?

So your task as a writer is to develop your tastes as far and as finely as possible. You can’t do that in isolation from the broad sweep of contemporary writing. You have to develop your own taste with reference to what others read. But still – write to please just one person. And make it you.

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.

Uh, Kurt? This is just BS, and he surely knew it.

I mean the cockroaches/pages thing: OK, yes, at that point, I think there is often a kind of solid inevitability in play … but not always. In one of my Fiona books, Fiona ends up clapping handcuffs on the dastardly people who tried to imprison her (in a very weird way.) That part plays out as the reader should by then expect.

But then, a Ukrainian millionaire tries to bribe her … and she (in a Fiona-y way) semi-accepts the offer.

And a girl who went missing needs to be reunited with her father, and Fiona does just that.

Both of those things make sense from what went before, but I don’t think any reader could plausibly have mapped out either scene. So, sorry, Kurt, no way. I think you were having a laugh.”