Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing Fiction
Boy, even when I leave an article in the control panel for Dro to post on Sunday, nothing happens. Anyway, here it is:
My dad sent these to me a few weeks ago. I had never heard them before and thought they were very good rules for writing, and I was surprised to find that I was violating about half of them in my novel. I’ve always believed in number 6, particularly since one of my favorite authors is Orson Scott Card and he puts many of his characters through the most hellish mental and moral situations possible, and it always creates excellent characters. I figured I’d post these rules here for your reading pleasure. Maybe you are a writer yourself and like me have not come across them before.
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. Now 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.
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Love it. Almost inspired me to start writing something outside of the blogosphere.