7 Kurt Vonnegut lessons every writer should learn.
I bet you will relate to the 6th
He survived bombs and bullets in the Second World War.
But his problems weren’t over, he was taken prisoner by the Nazis.
The Nazis imprisoned him in a slaughterhouse, perhaps to remind him of his ultimate fate.
The slaughterhouse was in Dresden. The Germans called it Schlachthof Fünf or Slaughterhouse-Five.
Once more bombs rained, this time friendly bombs from the allied forces. Together with other prisoners of war, he survived. They hid in an underground meat locker.
These experiences would become powerful fodder for his writing.
After returning to the US and publishing six books, in 1969 Kurt Vonnegut published his most famous book titled, “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
The book was a memoir a blending of science fiction and personal wartime trauma. It chronicled the horrors of war. It became a classic, one of the greatest personal accounts of the II World War ever written.
He became a great writer and won dozens of literary awards, including four Hugos. and was recognized posthumously for his literary achievements. He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2015, eight years after his death.
Kurt Vonnegut’s writing career spanned five decades.
In his lifetime he published 14 novels, three short stories, five plays, and five nonfiction.
Vonnegut had punchy advice for any would-be writer:
“Why should you observe your writing style with the idea of I’m roving it?” He asked
Then advised,
“Do it as a mark of respect for your readers Whatever you are writing if you scribble your thoughts any which way your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them they will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowder head or worse they will stop reading your writing
The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you don’t know what is interesting and what is not.
Don’t you like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of language? No.”
Here are 7 lessons Vonnegut wished every writer should know;
1. Find a subject you care about
Writing is caring. Your words should awaken your innermost feelings. Leave mechanical writing devoid of emotions to AI.
Don't just write, cry, laugh, scream! for God's sake leak some emotions!
Find a subject you care about a subject other people will care about and let it pour out of you.
It's not your games with language or your mastery of grammar that gets readership, it's the connection you make with the reader when you show care on every page.
Heed Kurt Vonnegut's advice,
“I’m not urging you to write a novel by the way-although I will not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something a petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.”
2. Do not ramble though I won’t ramble on about that.
That's Vonnegut's second advice.
3. Keep it simple
The simplicity of language is not only reputable but perhaps even sacred. wrote Vonnegut
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.”
Write for a 5th grader. words that make sense and don't need a dictionary.
William Shakespeare and James Joyce two great writing maestros wrote profound subjects in childlike sentences.
“To be or not to be” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
“Eveline” is this one, “ She was tired.” wrote James Joyce
At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.
4. Have the guts to cut
It may be that you too are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra in your writing.
But 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.
5. Sound like yourself
Here is what Vonnegut said about sounding like yourself;
“The writing style which is most natural is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child.
English was the novelist Joseph Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish.
And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical.
I myself grew up in Indianapolis where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin and employs a vocabulary as unornamented as a monkey wrench.
In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times
Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English or an English dialect a majority cannot understand.
All these varieties of speech are beautiful.
No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life If it happens not to be standard English, the result is usually delightful like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.
I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis which is what I am.
What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you as well: to write like a cultivated Englishman of a century or more ago.”
6. Say what you mean to say
I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more.
I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness but for saying precisely what their withers meant them to say.
My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words and relating those words to one another unambiguously rigidly, like parts of a machine.
The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all.
They hoped that I would become understandable –and therefore understood.
And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what a number of Jazz idols did with music.
If I broke all the rules of punctuation had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy I would simply not be understood.
So you too had better avoid Picasso style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.
Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before, why this is because they themselves have a tough job to do and they need all the help they can get from us.
7. Pity the reader
They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper and make sense of them immediately.
They have to read an art so difficult that most people don’t master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years.
So this discussion must finally admit that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamourous since our readers are bound to such imperfect artists.
Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify –whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.
That is bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique constitution that allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment.
So the most meaningful aspect of our styles which is what we choose to write about is utterly unlimited.
Final Thoughts
Vonnegut was an atheist who divorced his wife because of her Christian beliefs. Besides his spirituality, he was a splendid writer who exuded the talent of the garb with his pen.
