Kurt Vonnegut’s Top 13 Writing Tips
Tips from the award-winning novelist of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’
Few people are brave enough or absurd enough to write an anti-war novel infused with a sci-fi story about a man traveling through time and meeting creatures from another planet.
And yet, that’s exactly what Kurt Vonnegut did in Slaughterhouse-Five.
Vonnegut wasn’t afraid to be different. He wrote exactly the way he wanted to write, which was the only way he knew how. And the result was fictional masterpieces that stimulated conversation, controversy, and celebrity.
Vonnegut passed on his writing legacy to students he taught in workshops and college classes, and his student Suzanne McConnell recently memorialized her teacher’s advice in a book called Pity the Reader.
Here are the top 13 lessons I learned from Vonnegut in Pity the Reader:
1. Don’t make the reader’s job harder.
“We must acknowledge that the reader is doing something quite difficult for him, and the reason you don’t change point of view too often is so he won’t get lost; and the reason you paragraph often is so that his eyes won’t get tired, is so you get him without him knowing it by making his job easy for him. He has to restage your show…
