In honor of one of my heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, I decided to post this for all you writers and would-be writers out there. It’s from his collection of short fiction called Bagombo Snuff Box. Check it out.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
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.
7. 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.
8. 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.

Pretty cool, huh? I don’t know about #8 ’cause I’m not a fan of too-much-info-at-once. I’d like to think he meant you should be able to weave the info into the narrative and not dump it all on page 2. As my prof always says, “A good writer can feed info to the reader without the reader being too aware of it. A good writer doesn’t spoon-feed info. You must always assume that the reader is as smart as you are and can figure things out for herself.”

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 8:24 am and is filed under Et Cetera, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.