Navigation

8 Basics of Creative Writing - Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut’s Bagombo Snuff Box is a collection of short stories published in 1999. Most of the stories in the collection were published in the 50s, Vonnegut re-writing three of them.
However, the interesting thing about the collection is that in Peter Reed’s preface he writes about what Vonnegut called his 8 basics of Creative Writing 101. Here they are:

  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.

He also had this to say about his basics:

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

 

La Muse - Get Inspired!