Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—: “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”330

“What a character wants and what a character is afraid of are often the same thing.”

Hemingway once counseled his friend Marlene Dietrich, “Never confuse movement for action.”340 Fiction writers shouldn’t either. Picture a kid in a tantrum, flailing around on the floor. That’s movement. Cops and robbers in a chase. More movement. 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.

Kurt told us in class that Cat’s Cradle was composed in the form of jokes. One could say a joke, a telegram, and a poem have a lot in common.

“What is the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?” she might ask me. “I don’t know,” I would say. “You can’t hear an enzyme,”

Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there’s nothing else he can do.421

“gallows humor.”… One of the examples Freud gives is a man about to be hanged, and the hangman says, “Do you have anything to say?” The condemned man replies, “Not at this time.”

Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.454 That’s Vonnegut’s “Creative Writing 101” Rule #4. It’s intended for the economical form of the short story.

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. Then, attend to the finer points of line editing: Revise for clarity. Revise for words that are more accurate, concrete, and alive. Revise sentences so their sound and structure yield the most bang for the buck you intend. Proofread for glitches of punctuation, typos, misspellings, and so on.

Whatever writing you do increases your skill in tangling with words.

My point was, and maybe I can make it today without having to finish that book, that workers in the field of mental health at various times in different parts of the world must find themselves asked to make healthy people happier in cultures and societies which have gone insane. Let me hasten to say that the situation in our own country is nowhere near that dire. The goal here right now, it seems to me, is to train intelligent, well-educated people to speak stupidly so that they can be more popular.536

Dr. Andreasen published an article in the Atlantic Monthly about her lifelong investigation of the creative brain, this time including scientists among her subjects.545 She claims that higher rates of mental illness among creative people do occur, although admits that they share “a personality style” which may impact that assertion: They take risks.… They have to confront doubt and rejection. And yet they have to persist in spite of that, because they believe strongly in the value of what they do. This can lead to psychic pain, which may manifest itself as depression or anxiety, or lead people to attempt to reduce their discomfort by turning to pain relievers such as alcohol. “Particularly in science,” she writes, “the best work tends to occur in new frontiers. (As a popular saying among scientists goes: ‘When you work at the cutting edge, you are likely to bleed.’)”

As Vonnegut counseled in Mother Night: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Third: Practice the pause of appreciation. Every graduation pep talk I’ve ever given has ended with words about my father’s kid brother, Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard educated insurance agent in Indianapolis, who was well-read and wise. … One of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when they were happy. He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”550

Marriage: a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two. Ambrose Bierce (1842–?)579

As Vonnegut says, through his character Constant in The Sirens of Titan, A purpose of human life… is to love whoever is around to be loved.585