Vonnegut's Craft | Research

Here is what I know about writing, for whatever it’s worth. And so it goes.

The Eight Rules

I wrote these down once. They seem to have helped some people.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. This is the most important one. Everything else is negotiable.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. They don’t have to be perfect. Perfect is boring. Just somebody we can care about a little.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. If it doesn’t do either, out it goes.
Start as close to the end as possible. Skip the preamble. Your reader is already busy.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them. That’s how we find out what they’re made of.
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. I wrote for my sister Alice.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell 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.

Now here’s the thing. Flannery O’Connor broke practically every one of these rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

The Shape of Stories

I tried to get a master’s degree with this idea. The University of Chicago rejected my thesis because it was “so simple and looked like too much fun.” They were probably right to reject it. It was simple. It was fun. And it was true.

Stories have shapes. You can draw them on graph paper. Good fortune on top, bad fortune on the bottom. Beginning on the left, end on the right.

Man in Hole. Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love this one.

Boy Meets Girl. You know how this goes.

Cinderella. The most popular story in our civilization. Every time somebody tells it, they make a million dollars. Girl starts low, gets magic help, goes to the ball, loses it all at midnight, then gets the prince. Ka-ching.

From Bad to Worse. This is tragedy. Shakespeare did pretty well with it.

Hamlet. Here’s an interesting one. You can’t tell if what happens to Hamlet is good or bad. Is the ghost good news or bad news? We don’t know. Shakespeare refused to tell us. And that, I think, is why we keep studying him. His plays look like life. We can’t tell what’s good or bad in life either.

Some researchers tested this theory recently with computers. They fed them thousands of stories. They found six basic shapes. I was right all along. Not that it matters.

How to Write with Style

Find a subject you care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be compelling and seductive.

Keep it simple. Shakespeare and James Joyce wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” The longest word is three letters long.

Sound like yourself. The writing style most natural for you echoes the speech you heard when a child. I grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin. When I sound like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am, people trust me most.

Have the guts to cut. If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

Pity the readers. They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper and make sense of them immediately. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers. We would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales. But we must not.

On Semicolons

Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

On the Purpose of Art

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.

On the Writing Life

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. No one works well eight hours a day. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism.

And So

Simplicity is sacred. Sound like yourself. Respect your readers. Write for one person. Make characters want things. Test them through adversity. Stories have shapes. Rules exist to be broken.

Art makes life more bearable.

So it goes.