Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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.299

Special attention should be given to the state of good or ill fortune of the focal character or characters at the beginning of a tale, and again at the end. The story-teller will customarily help, will emphasize the high, low, or medium condition of his characters at crucial points

a tale begins when its focal character or characters experience changes in fortune, and it ends when those fluctuations cease. All else is background.

“A story-teller must tell his story in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted.”

This is the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound.

Plot might not be what’s really going on, but it’s a governing tool, a necessity. It keeps the reader reading. And it may be much more than that, too. What happens, after all, is what happens. And it matters.

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.

So we give all the important actions and speeches to just a few characters. We create stars. We say in effect to audiences, “Just keep your eyes on the stars, and get to know a little something about them, and you won’t miss anything.”

The story is told while Campbell’s imprisoned in Israel, after the war. If it unfolded during the time he was acting as a double agent, the story would have to lean on plot. But told in retrospect, and in prison, the story centers on character—one forced to account for himself, his duplicity, and the consequence of his actions.

if you have a character voice what might be a reader’s objection, you can get away with murder, fictionally speaking.

Interaction between a given personality and a situation of conflict that arises, provoking choice and action—consequently revealing, changing, or deepening a character—is what storytelling is all about.

But I do know the imagination can be cultivated, by permission and exercise. It’s clear Vonnegut let his out to play all the time.

I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes. Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and the character is me. I don’t mean that I am a glorious character. I simply mean that, for better or for worse, I have always rigged my stories so as to include myself, and I can’t stop now. And I do this so slyly, as do most novelists, that the author can’t be put on film.

try being whoever you are, from wherever you’ve hailed, and see what happens.

typoglycemia I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the human mind. Aoccdrnig to a rescheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t matter inwaht order the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt thing is that the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae the human mind deos not raed ervey leter by istlef, but the word as a whlohe. Amzanig, huh?

Vonnegut’s playfulness can also lead to the misperception that Vonnegut is careless about grammar and punctuation. A Columbia University graduate student suggested that to me last week. To the contrary. He is a master of both. He could play around so much because he had the mechanics and architecture of language and writing firmly under his belt. Freedom to fool around comes with mastery.

One of my favorite cartoons—I think it was by Shel Silverstein—shows a couple of guys chained to an eighteen-foot cell wall, hung by their wrists, and their ankles are chained, too. Above them is a tiny barred window that a mouse couldn’t crawl through. And one of the guys is saying to the other, “Now here’s my plan.…” It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.… And it strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that a man can always solve his problems. There is that implication that if you just have a little more energy, a little more fight, the problem can always be solved. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry—or laugh.

One thing Kurt never tried on us was his own wit at our expense. If something irritated or angered him, he was direct and outspoken about it.

The fact that we’re animals conscious of ourselves as alive and simultaneously of our impending demise makes fecund soil for gallows humor. Talk about helplessness! The tragic! Sure, Kurt found death the world’s biggest joke.

For whatever reason, American humorists or satirists or whatever you want to call them, those who choose to laugh rather than weep about demoralizing information, become intolerably unfunny pessimists if they live past a certain age.

The Playboy Interview with me in this book is what I should have said, not what I really said. Playboy showed me a typescript of what I had said into their tape recorder, and it was obvious to me that I had at least one thing in common with Joseph Conrad: English was my second language. Unlike Conrad, I had no first language, so I went to work on the transcript with pen and pencil and scissors and paste, to make it appear that speaking my native tongue and thinking about important matters came very easily to me.444

This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades. They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise [italics mine] their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

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

Every sentence has to fight for its life, but you have to know the life it’s fighting for. When you know what your story is truly about, you’ll know better what to keep, to perfect, or discard.

It’s easier to gut great stuff if you tell yourself you’re going to write other great stuff. Don’t be cheap on yourself! There’s more where that came from!

If you adhere to every voice offering suggestions, pandering to one and then the other, you may find yourself so far off course that you’re out at sea. Especially beware of a hidden promise of fame or success (“If you change this so it’s more like the best seller so-and-so”). You may realize one day that you are no longer writing the book that you yourself wanted to write. You may no longer even be enjoying the process of writing. So be careful. You have to listen to the third parties. You also must listen, most closely, to yourself.

The “slit-my-throat” line was thrilling, boosting my confidence at a time when it was pretty wobbly.

Sometimes quitting means laying a piece aside, maybe for years. Perceiving it in those terms can be a useful way to permit yourself to stop if something isn’t working. And maybe that, in fact, will be the truth. Sometimes it means that whatever is on your mind will find another avenue of expression. Sometimes it is a goodbye.

Sticky issue, whether letting go or going on is the thing to do. If you’re wondering, check your mental health. If it’s going downhill, give what you’re working on a rest. Write something else entirely.

“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings… not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems,” the protagonist, Paul, says in Player Piano.468 Caught up in the competitive, collective tunnel-vision focus of the writing life—MFA programs, conferences, online forums, peer groups, the endeavor to publish—one can easily forget that writing is simply one among many possible expressions of your sensibilities.

Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. I [the fictional author] had given [Trout] a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.469 Consider slacking up on the iron will to write, if it gives you a life not worth living. Caught up in the writing life—and the idea of being “a writer”—the reasons you began writing in the first place may dim. Consider slacking up on that involvement, if that happens. Do something else that’s compelling to you.

Vonnegut struggled. If you are a writer, you will probably struggle financially as well. But struggle isn’t bad. Struggle means you’re engaged, you’re learning, striving. What really sucks is listlessness, indifference, purposelessness.

I mean that they won’t want to wait passively for somebody to discover them. They will insist on being read.498

I am frankly embarrassed by the money. Success makes you feel the world has gone mad. When you are successful, you discover that you can publish almost anything, and the response to that is to simply stop writing. That is why I’m looking for a new line of work.

Don’t worry. You probably won’t have to endure the downsides of fame and fortune. But you can emulate the upsides.

Your well-being is primary. Your mind and body—you—are what you inhabit and what you employ in this cosmic game. You are, as a writer, your equipment. So attention must be paid to your health and upkeep.

My friend Vance Bourjaily worked up a scheme which makes sense to me. He wants to build an enormous typewriter keyboard with each key about the size of a dinner plate, and he would mount these keys on the wall of the study. Each morning he would get up, take a shower, eat Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions, and, in a sweatsuit and a pair of boxing gloves, he would spend all morning slugging these keys. He would lose weight, his blood would circulate beautifully, and he could eat a big lunch and feel in great shape. He proposed this as a joke, but it didn’t seem very funny to him and it didn’t seem very funny to me. I think one of us will build this gadget. [laugh]

I am, of course, notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

It’s humbling to be an amateur or a beginner, though, so in order to do it, you must insist on your right to be amateurish and a beginner.

All the arts involve the creative process. Yet each is distinct. Besides just giving you a kick, delving into another form’s practice can give you a kick in the butt, a shockingly fresh view, and insight. You are yourself no matter what medium you use, as Vonnegut’s drawings evidence.

All Vonnegut’s children embraced their father’s belief in the arts. Dabblers as well as serious artists, each is devoted to one form and investigates others.

Now—that would be terminal. One of the many unnecessary American catastrophes going on right now… is all the people who are getting divorced because they don’t love each other anymore. That is like trading in a car when the ashtrays are full. When you don’t respect your mate anymore—that’s when the transmission is shot and there’s a crack in the engine block.… “Ye shall respect one another.” Now there is something almost anybody in reasonable mental health can do day after day, year in and year out, come one, come all, to everyone’s clear benefit.

To the waitress everybody was “honeybunch” and “darling” and “dear.” It was like an emergency ward after a great catastrophe. It did not matter what race or class the victims belonged to. They were all given the same miracle drug, which was coffee. The catastrophe in this case, of course, was that the sun had come up again.

A vitamin or mineral deficiency always has bad effects. A Folk Society deficiency (hereafter “FSD”) quite often does. The trouble begins when a person suffering from FSD stops thinking, in order to become a member of an artificial extended family which happens to be crazy. The homicidal “family” of Charles Manson springs to mind. Or… the cult of the Reverend Jim Jones.611

And anyone who has finished a book, whether the thing has been published or not, whether the thing is any good or not, is a colleague of ours.

Vonnegut replied to a grateful first-time novelist, who had thanked him for being an inspiration: The fact that you have completed a work of fiction of which you are proud, which you made as good as you could, makes you as close a blood relative as my brother Bernard.