Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Fetishism of famous writers, he suggested, occurs because “it’s such heavy-lifting to actually read books.”

“Find a subject you care about.”

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.

The point is, writing well, even an ordinary letter or a well-considered e-mail, demands the generosity of your time, effort, and thought. You have to care enough that it’s worth your energy, weighing that cost against the cost of not doing it.

Sometimes a subject finds you. It is not a matter of seeking what you care about. Something happens right in your face that you end up caring about so fiercely that it becomes integral to your being.

It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

The second suggestion Vonnegut makes in “How to Write with Style” is “Do not ramble.” I won’t, as he said he wouldn’t, “ramble on about that.” The third is “Keep it simple.”

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.”13

A notion abounds that difficult writing—archaic, convoluted, or chock-full of esoteric words—is somehow elevated, more intelligent than plainspoken language. If you can’t understand it, it must be really superior. Vonnegut based more than one novel on the absurdity of such premises.

How do you keep from rambling? How do you “keep it simple”? Take Vonnegut’s fourth piece of advice: “Have the guts to cut.”

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.16

Vonnegut’s fifth item of advice is “Sound like yourself.”

his sixth piece of advice: “Say what you mean to say.”

Vonnegut’s seventh rule: “Pity the readers”:

Kurt calls reading an “art.” You are not born with it. You must learn how to do it, and as with any art, you can keep gaining skill and pleasure in it for the rest of your life.

fiction is melody, and journalism, new or old, is noise.42

Writing is hard work. Writing well is very hard work. It takes courage and perseverance.

“You have to sit there,” as Kurt said. “It’s physically uncomfortable, it’s physically bad for someone to sit still that long, and it’s socially bad for a person to be alone that much. The working conditions are really bad. Nobody has ever found the solution to that.”44

So a writer is someone who is willing to be uncomfortable enough—or is uncomfortable enough by nature—to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and why they’re going there. A writer is willing to take risks for that wondering. A writer cares that much about his or her subject.

Vonnegut felt so strongly that passion about people and issues ought to be the prime mover for a writer that he would rather you err on the side of caring passionately vs. writing eloquently:

You will be writing about your own life anyway, but you won’t know it, if you write a hack western—or not a hack western, if you write an excellent western like High Noon. Because somewhere in there is the coded psychiatric problem of the author. And if you write an episode for some space program on television, this will somehow parallel things that are on your mind, as unresolved conflicts. But that’s the place to write and that’s the way to deal with your conflicts too, if you want to write fast, if you don’t want to get blocked.70

Be kind to yourself. Give yourself room. There are years to go. Don’t pummel yourself with expectation. Go easy. Your material will eventually find its way to voice.

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.108

Writing is a generosity, even to yourself.

“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.

All writing teaches—communicates something about something. Even bad writing “teaches.” So if you’re writing, you’re teaching. You can’t help it. But then there’s intentional teaching through writing.

A plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.

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.

Any artist of any kind has to be able to stomach falling short of the mark, continually, in all kinds of ways. But perhaps especially when starting out.

Everyone wants to know The Way. But there is no single Way. There is only discovering your own. That entails imitating paths others have tread, taking advice, and exploring what works best for you.

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.

You take an issue about which you feel urgency, mix it with your experience, add the imaginative “what if,” and whammy, you’ve got ammunition for a book.

You can start anywhere and keep on going and see where it leads you, parting the layers of fat on your brain until your consciousness emerges, reeling your own tape out of your own mouth.

You can steal a plot.

One of the hardest lessons for novice writers to realize is that caring alone, no matter what you’ve been through or what story you have to tell, doesn’t matter in terms of rendering the successful creation of your work. It’s not your story that matters. It’s how you tell it.

A single, core conflict is at the heart of the structure of a story. No conflict equals no plot. Motivation and conflict are the engines that initiate a story, keep it moving, and form its particular shape.

Vonnegut’s “Creative Writing 101” Rule #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.

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

Vonnegut’s “Creative Writing 101” Rule #2: Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.324

Conflict within the same character makes that character more complex and compelling. And believable.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, creating an “innocent” main character—one ignorant of the lay of the land or the problem to be solved—can be a wonderfully natural way to lead your reader into a story.

The intensity of good or ill fortune is expressed by the tale-teller, in exposition or in the reactions of characters in his tale. If something seemingly bad or good happens in a tale, and neither the tale-teller nor his characters are impressed, then nothing much has really happened.335

Character and action impinge upon one another, in life as in fiction. A person’s inherent character shapes his or her choices. The opposite is also true: character rises out of choice and action. 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.

True action combines realization—when a character is “impressed”—and acting on it in a way that makes a difference to the character’s life or others.

Whether rigging or not, one’s self and the myriad aspects of oneself show up in one’s characters. The more you are able to encompass and give voice to those aspects, the larger you grow, and the better fiction writer you will be. You’ll meet yourself on the river, as it were.

Language is a kind of music. Silence at play with sound. Cadence, beats, accents, and tone.

Written language is one of the visual arts. Visual devices that we call punctuation direct the reader when to pause, or stop. They alert you to what’s more important (and less). Quotation marks let you know someone is speaking, paragraphing that a new thought-cluster is occurring, and a line skipped after a paragraph that there’s a change coming in subject, time, or point of view. Et cetera.

Shapes of text are like clothing: they’re what content wears.

Appearance counts. On the page as on the body.

Dialogue is the most pictorial component of ordinary prose.* Even veteran writers have to work on the mechanics of dialogue. A good conversation on the page can look like a tennis match. One swings. The other swings back. No speaker attributions. Just the ball of dialogue going back and forth.