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Most important of all was his advice that I should not follow any of his suggestions ‘just because I suggested them.’ He emphasized that I should only carry out those suggestions ‘that ring a bell with you.’ He said I should not write or change anything simply because he (or any other editor or writer) suggested it unless the suggestions fit my own intention and vision for the book.” Wakefield says it was “one of the most valuable editorial lessons I ever learned.”
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about [italics mine]. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Some reviewers dismissed Kurt Vonnegut’s writing for being too simple. John Irving criticized Vonnegut’s critics. They think, Irving wrote, that “if the work is tortured and a ghastly effort to read, it must be serious,” whereas “if the work is lucid and sharp and the narrative flows like water, we should suspect the work of being simplistic, and as light and as lacking in seriousness as fluff. This is simplistic criticism, of course; it is easy criticism too.
The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child.
“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,” Kurt explains under his sixth piece of advice: “Say what you mean to say.”
The messages that come out on the typewriter are very crude or foolish—misleading—but I know that if I spend enough time at the typewriter the most intelligent part of me will finally make itself known and I will be able to decode what it is trying to talk about.
When he was alive he was like a dead man in 1 respect: everything was pretty much all right with him.
You may feel loyalty to an actual experience that interferes with your ability to refashion it into telling the truth of it fictionally.
You may suffer from reliving trauma, and delving into what it holds for you may cause you more emotional stress than you can handle or than is worth it for your well-being.
Making a commitment like that is powerful. Commitment invites Fate to be your Fairy Godmother Collaborator, to close and open just the doors you need.
He had to sacrifice his dream of what the book might be for the sake of what he could in fact now deliver.
Writers can’t write great things all the time. You do the best you can, then you have to move on. Otherwise you’ll end up writing the same book your whole life.89
The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow.
“So, uh, are you saying that, um, we should just forget about this fiction writing thing?” At this, Mr. Vonnegut (stubbing out his cigarette, of course) sat up a little straighter and got a bit of a glint in his eye, and said, “Oh no. Don’t get the wrong idea here. You’ll never make a living at being a writer. Hell you may even die trying. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write. You should write for the same reasons you should take dancing lessons. For the same reason you should learn what fork to use at a fancy dinner. For the same reason you need to see the world. It’s about grace.”
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.
If a person with a demonstrably ordinary mind, like mine, will devote himself to giving birth to a work of the imagination, that work will in turn tempt and tease that ordinary mind into cleverness.
You think and observe this particular way, and by that specific presentation you assert your individuality and confirm the value of your experience.
“One way to approach a story,” the writer Josephine Humphreys suggests, “is to think of it as the writer’s response to the most important question he can ask. The response is often complex, ambiguous and changeable, but the question is simple and almost always the same. The bigger the question, the riskier the fiction.”
A writer’s voice is “grounded in a single scene,” Reynolds Price posits, “most often a lingering sight from childhood or early youth. And that scene is almost always one that a seasoned reader may well suspect lies near the start of a given writer’s reason for writing, the physical moment in which a single enormous question rose before a watchful child and fueled the lifelong search for an answer.”
One thing writing Breakfast did for me was to bring right to the surface my anger with my parents for not being happier than they were.… I’m damned if I’ll pass their useless sadness on to my children if I can possibly help it.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”
At a time when I sorely needed models to know that one could keep on trucking, one could even thrive, in spite of personal and societal traumas, he was there, a template, teaching and writing.
If you ever wonder what in hell you think you’re doing with your life, let me remind you that you are telling people as reasonable and humane as yourself what they desperately need to hear, that others feel as they do.
If you’re a writer or an artist of any kind, your self-expression will ring a bell with some other self. You can count on that.
Whatever the future may hold for literature in classrooms, uncounted millions of Americans will continue to meditate with books in perfect privacy, escaping from their own weary minds for at least a little while.
“I’m not a drug salesman. I’m a writer.” “What makes you think a writer isn’t a drug salesman?” “I’ll accept that. Guilty as charged.”
Talent is required. But it’s only one of the components for creating good fiction. And being possessed of less than superlative gifts doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue writing.
Vonnegut was not without poses, but pretending his writing emerged full-bodied from Zeus’s forehead was not one of them.
A creative writing course provides experienced editors for inspired amateurs.
Writing takes a kind of demented patience.’
Ask any artist, anyone accomplishing anything of value: patience, perseverance, and work, those humble virtues, rate at least as high as talent on the list of necessary equipment, any day.
“Good Taste will put you out of business,” [Vonnegut] declared.… “For some reason almost all good writers are drop-outs,” he said. “English departments have never produced a (good) writer.” He suggested that this is because people learn what is considered “good taste” at a stage “when they themselves aren’t capable of doing very good work. So what they learn makes them hate what they write. And they stop before they ever get started.”
Any artist of any kind has to be able to stomach falling short of the mark, continually, in all kinds of ways.
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.
Every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That’s the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.
This advice always makes me worry that I’m doing something wrong. Because it’s not true for me. To give Kurt the benefit of the doubt, perhaps I’ve been unaware—as you may be, as he was—that I’ve someone for whom I’m telling any given story. But I don’t think so. Like many writers, I’m telling myself the story, the universe, whoever has ears to hear.
Imitate Kurt Vonnegut and the Big Bad Wolf. big ears and big eyes snag a lot of fodder for fiction.
[The storyteller’s] initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound. Thus does a story generate itself [italics mine].
Vonnegut ups the ante from the truth, in his fictional story, as any good fiction writer does.
You have to play by the rules of the game of fiction well enough so that you can get across what is in the rag-and-bone shop of your heart. You have to be like a magician or pickpocket, distracting the audience by entertaining, while you are really saying those things you most want to say.
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.275
So “hooking the reader” means employing an “arresting lead.” Not dramatic hyperbole or obfuscation, but arousing curiosity through informing.
I’ve edited over a hundred. I’ve learned a lot about writing, being on this editorial side of the fence. One of the most important things is that almost all stories have problems with the setup. These problems usually entail not furnishing enough information for the reader to easily grasp the who-what-where-when of the situation, using fancy prose that makes the reader stumble, or not getting quickly enough to the central conflict.
“Throw out the first two pages!” Vonnegut would say over and over in class, responding to a story. Later he converted that into “Creative Writing 101” Rule #5: “Start as close to the end as possible.”281 “Throw out the first two pages” is better advice, to my mind.
These discardable “first two pages” may be necessary for the writer in composing the story. They may indeed become expendable. But you do not have to accomplish all the acrobatic tasks required for the beginning when you begin writing the story. Start however you start. The time to worry about perfecting the opening is later, in the revision process.
Plot—the very concept, and the structure of any plot—relies on the reader’s curiosity.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading.
Somebody gets into trouble, and then gets out again; somebody loses something and gets it back; somebody is wronged and gets revenge; Cinderella; somebody hits the skids and just goes down, down, down; people fall in love with each other, and a lot of other people get in the way; a virtuous person is falsely accused of sin; a sinful person is believed to be virtuous; a person faces a challenge bravely, and succeeds or fails; a person lies, a person steals, a person kills, a person commits fornication.
