3 Lessons From Kurt Vonnegut Every Writer Should Hear.

Kurt Vonnegut made a career asking the big questions in dark and comedic ways. It’s one of the reasons I love his work and him as a person so much. He had off-kilter beliefs on punctuation, was a prisoner of war, and received much criticism in his time. He is a cult favorite and a household name by now, and his lessons on writing (which can be translated into life lessons if you look hard enough) are worth remembering.

“A true masterpiece cannot be crucified on a cross of this design. ”

Three years before his death, Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture on the “Shape of Stories”, drawing on a chalkboard the various types of story types in graph-form. On the Y-axis we have “good fortune” and “ill fortune” and on the X-axis we have “beginning” and “end”.

Vonnegut goes on to graph the plot of well-known stories; Cinderella, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, a basic “boy meets girl” story, etc. He shows how they rise and fall, how they end with good fortune, or with ill, and how they create their own shapes on the graph.

He then goes on to say, “a true masterpiece cannot be crucified on a cross of this design”, this being the graph behind him. He uses Hamlet as an example, who starts out much like Cinderella, relatively low on the happy scale, but then continues that way until he is killed. Will he be satisfied and fulfilled having avenged his father and be high on the “good fortune” axis like Cinderella, or be in eternal “ill fortune” like Kafka’s cockroach? We actually never know how Hamlet feels.

Does this make Hamlet a bad story because it doesn’t fit into the conventions of this graph? Does it make Shakespeare a bad storyteller? Even though that can be a personal debate between many, the point is clear; stories don’t have to fit into a mold to be masterpieces.

“We are so seldom told the truth and in Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us [the truth]; we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and what the bad news is, and we [as humans] respond to that.” — Kurt Vonnegut

“Practicing art is not a way to make money or become famous, it’s a way to make your soul grow.”

In a 1998 discussion with Lee Stringer for Seven Stories Press, Vonnegut recalls a book called “The Writer and Psychoanalysis” by Edmund Burgler who treated writers in New York for years. Burgler had said that “writers were fortunate enough that they could treat their neurosis every day by writing.”

Vonnegut’s face lights up at this. As someone who has been through war, you can see that he believes this and adheres to this with his writing. He goes on to explain that he has said before, that people will always write novels or short stories, because they will discover how much it helps them personally, saying any form of art is not a way to make money, but “a way to make your soul grow, so you should do it anyway.”

It is important to note that at the time, Bill Gates was making waves in computing, scaring many writers into thinking that the novel was going to “die”. That heavily influenced him in saying “people will always write novels”. He also told the audience thirty seconds after this that he’d pay a million dollars to whoever kills Bill Gates but that’s beside the point…

Keep it simple and don’t be afraid to cut

Known for and criticized for his lack of traditional structure and grammar usage, often repeating sentences or using single-line paragraphs, Kurt Vonnegut spoke often about saying a lot with very little. One thing can be said about Kurt; he gets his point across in little time.

In an article penned by Mr. Vonnegut in 1999 called “How To Write With Style”, something every writer should read, he wrote the below in regards to keeping it simple when characters are most at their most profound:

Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

That being said, as a fitting follow up to that statement, he addresses the editing process, the part that most writers I know dread. We take it personally when our editors suggest making cuts! We put out blood, sweat, tears, and souls into each character and line, and when we have to decide what to take out, well…it certainly adds to our neurosis.

I leave you will his advice on the matter: “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.”

I write on Medium for fun about topics that interest me in the indie writing, publishing, literature, and media realms. My personal project is an epic dark fantasy series of novels and short stories I am working on, which you can learn more about that on my website and join my newsletter for news, cat pics, and the shenanigans I get into as an indie author.