kurt vonnegut essays

The Daily Vonnegut welcomes essays about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut and reflections on the personal and public influence of Vonnegut’s work.

How Heroes Saved My Life by Alice B. Fogel (2017)

Earlier this year Seven Stories Press published If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s commencement speeches.  In this guest post, New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alice B. Fogel shares with us a commencement speech she gave in which KV figures prominently among the “heroes” who have influenced her life.

Kurt Vonnegut Saved Me – by Laura Barber (2017)

Three surgeries, five hospital stays, several months of intravenous food, a digestive system that gave up the ghost. A year off work—a terrible way to win an extended vacation.

Kurt Vonnegut, The Lapsed Secularist by Josh Privett (2017)

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in a commencement address at Bennington College in 1970, recounts how as a young man he was very optimistic about the promise of science to improve human life, thanks in part to his older brother, Bernard, who was an accomplished atmospheric scientist.

Mabel Disabled – Vonnegut inspired fiction by Mary Kuykendall (2017)

Writer Mary Kuykendall, whose short story “Mabel Disabled” is featured below, once worked for General Electric in Schenectady, as did Kurt Vonnegut.  While she was not at GE while Vonnegut was employed there as a public relations writer, the Vonnegut influence in “Mable Disabled” is clear.  Although she never met KV, she did meet his brother Bernard.

Kurt Vonnegut-From Science Fiction to Satire by Victoria Oliver (2017)

Kurt Vonnegut has remained a favorite author of mine for over forty years. The first book of his that I read was Mother Night , then followed by Slaughterhouse-Five, then Breakfast of Champions… I was so impressed by his writing that I started looking for as many of his books as I could find, and read them, then read them again, and again.

What I Pretended to Be — by Zachary Perdieu (2017)

Ask any friend of mine to provide a few details about me, and my affinity for Kurt Vonnegut would never slip past the third listed item. Despite this, I was late to the clambake, so to speak, relative to many other Vonnegut fans and scholars.

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Author Interviews

Kurt vonnegut: 'a man without a country'.

At 82, Kurt Vonnegut has published a new collection of essays and speeches. Edith Hwang hide caption

From his first novel, Player Piano , through such classics as Slaughterhouse Five , Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle , Kurt Vonnegut has entranced readers, often using sardonic humor to depict horrific events.

Now 82, he lives in New York City and his writing remains trenchant. This week, Vonnegut's collection of essays and speeches, A Man Without a Country will be published by Seven Stories Press. Read an excerpt:

From 'A Man without a Country'

We are not born with imagination. It has to be developed by teachers, by parents. There was a time when imagination was very important because it was the major source of entertainment.

In 1892 if you were a seven-year-old, you'd read a story -- just a very simple one -- about a girl whose dog had died. Doesn't that make you want to cry?

Don't you know how that little girl feels? And you'd read another story about a rich man slipping on a banana peel. Doesn't that make you want to laugh? And this imagination circuit is being built in your head. If you go to an art gallery, here's just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven't moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

But it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there's the information highway. We don't need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone's face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face.

Published by permission of the author and Seven Stories Press.

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How to Write with Style: Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Keys to the Power of the Written Word

By maria popova.

Vonnegut begins with an admonition against the impersonal sterility of journalistic reporting — something particularly important amidst contemporary debates about how personal the writerly persona should be — and a meditation on the single most important element of style:

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writing. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style. These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful–? And on and on. Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your reader will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an ego maniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you. The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No. So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

Vonnegut goes on to outline eight rules for great writing:

Find a Subject You Care About Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would 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. Do Not Ramble, Though I won’t ramble on about that. Keep It Simple As for your use of language: 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 just 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. Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. 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 earth.’ Have the Guts to Cut It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. 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. Sound like Yourself The writing style which is most natural for you 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 unornamental as a monkey wrench. […] 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 cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago. 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 authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the 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 any 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 higgledly-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. Pity the Readers Readers 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 really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years. So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be 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 the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique constitution, which 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. For Really Detailed Advice For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, a more technical sense, I commend to your attention The Elements of Style , by Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White . E. B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced. You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

Complement with Vonnegut on the shapes of stories , the secret of happiness , his daily routine , and his life-advice to his children .

For more timeless wisdom on writing, dive into this evolving library of great writers’ collected wisdom on the craft , including Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques , H. P. Lovecraft’s advice to aspiring writers , F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to his daughter , Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing , David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips , Henry Miller’s 11 commandments , John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers , Neil Gaiman’s 8 rules , Margaret Atwood’s 10 practical tips , and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings .

— Published January 14, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/01/14/how-to-write-with-style-kurt-vonnegut/ —

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Kurt Vonnegut

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Kurt Vonnegut (born November 11, 1922, Indianapolis, Indiana , U.S.—died April 11, 2007, New York , New York) was an American writer noted for his wryly satirical novels who frequently used postmodern techniques as well as elements of fantasy and science fiction to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization. Much of Vonnegut’s work is marked by an essentially fatalistic worldview that nonetheless embraces modern humanist beliefs.

Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis in a well-to-do family, although his father, an architect, was unemployed during much of the Great Depression . As a teenager, Vonnegut wrote for his high-school newspaper, and he continued the activity at Cornell University in Ithaca , New York, where he majored in biochemistry before leaving in 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Army. Captured by the Germans during World War II , he was one of the survivors of the firebombing of Dresden , Germany, in February 1945. After the war Vonnegut took graduate courses in anthropology at the University of Chicago while working as a reporter. He was later employed as a public relations writer in upstate New York, but his reservations about what he considered the deceitfulness of the profession led him to pursue fiction writing full-time.

In the early 1950s Vonnegut began publishing short stories . Many of them were concerned with technology and the future, which led some critics to classify Vonnegut as a science fiction writer, though he resisted the label. His first novel , Player Piano (1952), elaborates on those themes, visualizing a completely mechanized and automated society whose dehumanizing effects are unsuccessfully resisted by the scientists and workers in a New York factory town. For his second novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut imagined a scenario in which the entire history of the human race is considered an accident attendant on an alien planet’s search for a spare part for a spaceship.

Vonnegut abandoned science fiction tropes altogether in Mother Night (1961; film 1996), a novel about an American playwright who serves as a spy in Nazi Germany. In Cat’s Cradle (1963) some Caribbean islanders, who practice a religion consisting of harmless trivialities, come into contact with a substance discovered by an atomic scientist that eventually destroys all life on Earth. (In 1963 the University of Chicago granted Vonnegut a master’s degree in anthropology after he submitted Cat’s Cradle as a thesis.) The novel was particularly significant in its development of a slyly irreverent voice that constantly called attention to its own artifice; a similar “metafictional” style would characterize much of Vonnegut’s subsequent work. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) centres on the title character, an eccentric philanthropist, but also introduces the writer Kilgore Trout, a fictional alter ego of Vonnegut who appears throughout his oeuvre .

Although Vonnegut’s work had already gained a popular audience by the late 1960s, the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade (1969; film 1972) cemented his reputation. Explicitly drawing on his Dresden experience, Vonnegut crafted an absurdist nonlinear narrative in which the bombing raid serves as a symbol of the cruelty and destructiveness of war through the centuries. Critics lauded Slaughterhouse-Five as a modern-day classic. Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973; film 1999)—about a Midwestern businessman who becomes obsessed with Trout’s books—is a commentary on writing, fame, and American social values, interspersed with drawings by Vonnegut. Though reviews were mixed, it quickly became a best seller . Vonnegut’s next two novels were less successful. Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More! (1976; film 1982) focuses on a pair of grotesque siblings who devise a program to end loneliness, and Jailbird (1979) is a postmodern pastiche rooted in 20th-century American social history .

While Vonnegut remained prolific throughout the 1980s, he struggled with depression and in 1984 attempted suicide . His later novels include Deadeye Dick (1982), which revisits characters and settings from Breakfast of Champions ; Galápagos (1985), a fantasy of human evolution told from a detached future perspective; Bluebeard (1987), the fictional autobiography of an aging painter; Hocus Pocus (1990), about a college professor turned prison warden; and Timequake (1997), a loosely structured meditation on free will .

Vonnegut also wrote several plays, including Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970; film 1971 ); several works of nonfiction, such as the collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974); and several collections of short stories, chief among which was Welcome to the Monkey House (1968). In 2005 he published A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America , a collection of essays and speeches inspired in part by contemporary politics. Vonnegut’s posthumously published works include Armageddon in Retrospect (2008), a collection of fiction and nonfiction that focuses on war and peace, and a number of previously unpublished short stories, assembled in Look at the Birdie (2009) and While Mortals Sleep (2011). We Are What We Pretend to Be (2012) comprised an early unpublished novella and a fragment of a novel unfinished at his death. A selection of his correspondence was published as Letters (2012). Complete Stories (2017) collects all of his short fiction.

Vonnegut was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973. In 2010 the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library opened in Indianapolis . In addition to promoting the work of Vonnegut, the nonprofit organization served as a cultural and educational resource centre, including a museum, an art gallery, and a reading room.

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"i've too damned much to say": kurt vonnegut, world war ii, and slaughterhouse-five.

From January 1943 - June 1945, writer Kurt Vonnegut served in the US Army. His experiences with the 106th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge and then later as a POW in Dresden imprinted his life and provided traumatic (and sometimes comedic) material for his novel Slaughterhouse-Five  and other works.

Author Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) left an incredible body of work for readers. In his writing career, which spanned more than 50 years, he published 14 novels, three short story collections, and five books of essays, with additional material published after his death. Vonnegut’s service during World War II imprinted his life, like it did for many of those who served and who witnessed the trauma of war, destruction, and death.

Several of Vonnegut’s works touch on themes of war, but Slaughterhouse-Five  is the novel that most closely skirts the line of personal narrative, flirting with memoir, addressing the reader with, “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” The author makes cameos in his work, just as Hitchcock would, letting you know that he is still there, reminding the reader of his service, almost daring you to call it fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis and then began studying at Cornell University, before entering Army service in January 1943. Through the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), Vonnegut was sent to Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering. With a great reduction in the strength of the ASTP due to the rising need for infantry troops, Vonnegut was sent to Camp Atterbury, Indiana (close to home) to train with the 106th Infantry Division.

PFC Kurt Vonnegut, intelligence scout with the 423rd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division, arrived with his unit in Le Havre, France in December 1944. They received orders to proceed to St. Vith, just weeks before German artillery turned the Ardennes Forest into a living, deadly fireworks display. In the last two weeks of December 1944, American losses mounted as desperate Germans launched their counteroffensive. As many as 23,000 American were captured as under-supplied and encircled units, many of them uninitiated in combat, were forced to surrender. The 106th Infantry Division reported 6,697 prisoners overall. Vonnegut was captured on December 19, 1944. He wrote of the situation his unit faced in the moments of surrender, “Bayonets aren’t much good against tanks.”

Although the war was in its final months, Allied victory was still uncertain and Vonnegut and others taken prisoner in this period did not have an easy transition into captivity. According to the principles outlined in the Geneva Convention, POW officers were not required to perform labor for their captors. Vonnegut later wrote to his father, “I am, as you know, a Private.” Enlisted troops were often transferred to work detachments in small groups instead of being transferred to larger, organized camps. That winter was one of the coldest on record and conditions worsened for the Germans and for their prisoners as shipping was disrupting and the supply chain broke down, making it more difficult for the life-sustaining Red Cross aid to filter through to Allied POWs.

Another significant danger of POW life, especially for those outside of camps, was posed by Allied air raids.  POWs were often transported through German territory via railway car, sometimes marked with red crosses to alert Allied fliers, but railyards and boxcars were often strafed. The train carrying Vonnegut and others to Stalag IV-B was unmarked and was strafed and bombed by the RAF on Christmas Eve. At Stalag IV-B, Vonnegut was one of the unfortunates selected for a 150-man labor detachment destined for Dresden. From January 10th and into February, the American POWs were forced to work extremely long hours in a malt-syrup factory supplied with meager rations and overseen by cruel guards. They were sheltered in a slaughterhouse with the address Schlachthof 5 [Slaughterhouse-Five.] Vonnegut described the seminal event in the history of Dresden in a letter to his family, “On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.” Vonnegut and the other POWs escaped the firestorm in an underground meat locker. In the aftermath, the POWs were forced to recover bodies and collect corpses for burial or funeral pyres; surviving residents threw rocks and cursed them.

Prior to the Allies reaching Dresden, the POWs were evacuated ahead of liberation, as was often the case with prisoners of war both civilian and military in eastern parts of the German Reich. Vonnegut and the other survivors were eventually liberated by the Red Army in May 1945. RAMP [Recovered American Military Personnel] Vonnegut penned a letter to his father from Camp Lucky Strike in Le Havre. Just six months prior, but in a different world, in December 1944, Vonnegut had arrived in Le Havre with his unit ready to engage in combat with the Germans. In May 1945, thousands of former POWs were assembled there for processing and repatriation. Vonnegut wrote, “I’m told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than ‘missing in action.’ Chances are that you also failed to receive any of the letters I wrote from Germany. That leaves me a lot of explaining to do…” Two pages of explaining later he closes, 

“I’ve too damned much to say, the rest will have to wait, I can’t receive mail here so don’t write.”

Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano  in 1952. Slaughterhouse-Five  appeared in 1969, and was a breakthrough success, Vonnegut’s first bestseller. The novel was adapted to a film in 1972 and over time has been subjected to many challenges and bans throughout the country, even as recently as 2011. The novel supports so many different types of readings, but squarely within it lies the attempt of an American soldier (and then an American POW) to will himself into another place and time, a place far removed from the moonscape of Dresden, a place where “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

Curator to Curator Q & A: Kurt Vonnegut

In advance of a discussion on  Slaughterhouse-Five , Assistant Director for Curatorial Services Kimberly Guise posed some questions to Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library Curator Chris Lafave.

Kimberly Guise holds a BA in German and Judaic Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She also studied at the Universität Freiburg in Germany and holds a masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from Louisiana State University. Kim is fluent in German, reads Yiddish, and specializes in the American prisoner-of-war experience in World War II.

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Granfalloon: Celebrating the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut

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Criticism and Other Works About Kurt Vonnegut

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We offer here a selection of articles and essays on Kurt Vonnegut and his work across a number of subject areas, sourced from our electronic holdings (you will need to authenticate/log in via CAS/DUO in order to access):

Barrows, Adam. “‘Spastic in Time’: Time and Disability in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 12, no. 4, Dec. 2018, p. 391.

Raj, Ankit, and Nagendra Kumar. “The Hero at a Thousand Places: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five as Anti-Monomyth.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 62, no. 2, 2021, pp. 239–52. 

OLTEAN-CÎMPEAN, Alexandru. “Kurt Vonnegut’s Humanism: An Author’s Journey Towards Preaching for Peace.” Studii de Ştiintă Şi Cultură, vol. 12, no. 2, June 2016, pp. 259–66.

Shields, Charles J. “If Jesus Did Stand-Up: The Comic Parables of Kurt Vonnegut.” Studies in American Humor, vol. 3, no. 26, July 2012, pp. 25–39.

Louis, Ansu. “The Economy of Desire in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.” Symplokē: A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Scholarship, vol. 26, no. 1–2, 2018, pp. 191–205.

Hume, Kathryn. “The Heraclitean Cosmos of Kurt Vonnegut.” Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 18, no. 2, Spring 1982, p. 208.

Hattenhauer, Darryl. “The Politics of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron.’” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 35, no. 4, Fall 1998, p. 387.

Rampton, David. “Into the Secret Chamber: Art and the Artist in Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard .” Critique, vol. 35, no. 1, Fall 1993, p. 16.

Berryman, Charles. “After the Fall: Kurt Vonnegut.” Critique, vol. 26, no. 2, Winter 1985, p. 96.

Simuț, Andrei. “Elements of Science Fiction and the Fascination with the Post-Human Gaze in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos .” Caietele Echinox, vol. 26, 2014, pp. 282–91.

Easterbrook, Neil. “‘Playing with a Loop of String’: Tropes, Folds, and Narrative Form in Kurt Vonnegut.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), vol. 16, no. 1/2, Apr. 2010, pp. 73–85.

A selection of writings and videos gathering from across the internet, highlighting Vonnegut's life, writing, and career.

• "All Too Human: On Kurt Vonnegut’s Legacy" ( Los Angeles Review of Books )
• "Kurt Vonnegut on Making a Living as a Writer" ( The Nation )
• Kurt Vonnegut interview on His Life and Career (1983)
• Kurt Vonnegut interview on the Dick Cavett Show (1989)
• Kurt Vonnegut interview on WFYI (1991)
• Kurt Vonnegut, the Shape of Stories (2004)
• Lecture at Case Western Reserve University (2004)

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Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was an extremely popular American writer of humor and science-fiction novels and short stories. Vonnegut has particularly remained an important mentor for young pacifists, although his work has inspired a rather rabid cult following amongst others.

His novels are known for their dark humor and playful use of science fiction, as well as for their serious moral vision and cutting social commentary. Although his work has sometimes been criticized for being too simplistic, there are...

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Kurt Vonnegut Essays

The shifting aspirations between postmodern and modern paradigms: comparing 'slaughterhouse five' and "sorry to bother you' anonymous 12th grade, slaughterhouse five.

The isolation of individuals often leads to the loss of motivation to fight against corrupt systems within a world of upheaval, but when individuals unify, they are able to maintain the hope and aspiration necessary to confront these systems. Kurt...

My Enemy, the Human Anonymous 12th Grade

World War II is remembered as a struggle against an obviously evil entity; it was the Allied forces’ fight to put down the Axis powers and bring to an end the Nazi’s fascist regime. Allied troops are often exalted as heroes, and remembered for...

Insanity of War in Slaughterhouse Five GradeSaver

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is the tale of a gawky World War II veteran/soldier, Billy Pilgrim. His wartime experiences and their effects lead him to the ultimate conclusion that war is unexplainable. To portray this effectively,...

The Mayflower of Life Helen Huggins

"Fate: 'what has been spoken,' a power beyond men's control that is held to determine what happens" (Webster's Intermediate Dictionary 270).

Everywhere in the world, people attribute events to fate because of the belief that one has no control...

Foreshadowing of Events in Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five' Daniel James Wood

THIS IS A NOVEL SOMEWHAT IN THE TELEGRAPHIC SCHIZOPHRENIC MANNER OF TALES OF THE PLANET TRALFAMADORE

The foreshadowing of events in Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five' is as much a subtle indication of things to come as it is an expository...

Counterculture and Slaughterhouse-Five Ryan Pifer

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five is, at first glance, nothing more than a science fiction tale of one man's travels to another planet and his ability to view his life out of chronological order because of his power to time travel. There...

A Comparative Analysis of Slaughterhouse-five Anonymous

War has, undisputedly, been an element of every civilization's history throughout time, but the cause of war, however, is a topic of dispute. Is war something that humans bring on themselves, or has it been deemed inevitable, no matter the...

Kurt Vonnegut's Observations of War Trauma Anonymous

During times of war soldiers experience horrific atrocities that are mentally and physically crippling. Most cannot begin to comprehend these sinister and morbid images due to their lack of military experience. In Kurt Vonnegut's...

Structure and Meaning in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five James R Silvester

One of the most distinguishing aspects of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is the structure in which it is written. Throughout the novel, Billy Pilgrim travels uncontrollably to non-sequential moments of his life, or as Vonnegut says, “paying...

Analysis of Minor Characters in "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison and "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut Malvika Govil 12th Grade

Minor characters may not be the center of action or attraction, but novelists can use them to supplement the understanding of major characters and the thematic purpose of the text. In his novel Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969, Kurt Vonnegut...

The Illusion of Free Will Anonymous 12th Grade

Throughout the course of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the reader is taken through the life events of Billy Pilgrim, a character who amazingly lives through the Dresden firebombing and many other tragedies. Ironically, Billy finds...

An Analysis of Slaughterhouse-Five’s Implications About the Illusion of Free Will Anonymous 11th Grade

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five has been the subject of much attention and debate since its release. Its wide range of topics such as critique of the American government and discussion of existentialism have made it an extremely controversial...

"So It Went!" Malena Marcase 12th Grade

We see playful children - giggling, laughing, not a care in the world - and envy their innocence. Their spirits have not yet been hardened and jaded by the world around them. Our lives are made up of a series of moments, big and small, that...

Postmodernism: Extraordinarily Ordinary Stories Ryan Rusin 12th Grade

Can fiction, when challenged beyond the boundaries of logic, ever develop into reality? Post-modernist thinking is a way of manipulating the beliefs and concepts that shape literature, but even more so the typical methods of storytelling....

Trauma's Unveiling Anonymous College

Trauma is a tricky thing. It hurts people deeply, and then tricks them into believing they have forgotten about it or have overcome it. It nests deep within a person’s soul, perched between fragile emotions and memories, contaminating its...

Is There Closure in Slaughterhouse Five? Ellen Richards 10th Grade

Despite the fact that Kurt Vonnegut ends the novel Slaughterhouse Five in a manner that provokes the reader to believe it shows that the conflict has reached closure, the very end of the novel represents a new beginning. The author uses the last...

A Look at Billy Pilgrim’s Mental State Bradley Sylvester College

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five we are taken through the strange life of a Mr. Billy Pilgrim. The story revolves primarily around Billy’s time in Germany during WWII but also several other points in Billy’s life. What the reader will...

Do Not Be a Slave of Fortune: Strange Self-Assertion in Slaughterhouse-Five Joanna Zhang 11th Grade

Assuming you got a message anonymously, informing you that you were going to die because of a car accident tomorrow at noon, would you use this message to try avoiding death or would you simply accept and embrace your destiny? Many people,...

Slaughterhouse Five and Pan's Labyrinth: A Comparison of Themes, Juxtapositions, and Structure Anonymous 12th Grade

Guillermo Del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five mirror each other in that fact that both feature a main character who struggles to accept the realities of war, but the works vary in various ways. Details from both...

War as Tragically Absurd: Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five Anonymous 12th Grade

The concept of war is both gruesomely tragic, and deeply absurd. Through their respective texts, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, authors Joseph Heller and George Roy Hill capture the very essence of war, and it’s tragic absurdity, though...

Color Motifs/Imagery in Slaughterhouse Five      Nikhil Meka 12th Grade

In a literary text, imagery enables the author to appeal to human senses through the use of vivid and descriptive language. Kurt Vonnegut incorporates this rhetorical device throughout the text of his novel Slaughterhouse Five , through the use of...

How 'Slaughterhouse Five' Engages Gender Identity in the Context of Postmodernism Mia Kerrigan College

This essay will examine Vonnegut’s presentation of gender identity in relation to the postmodernism, concluding that Vonnegut uses conventions of postmodernist literature, such as a suspicion of metanarratives, intertextuality and a fragmented...

Organized Religion in Kurt Vonnegut's Cats Cradle: See God? See Satan? Auvijit Chakder

Cat's cradle.

"See the cat? See the cradle?" retorts the midget Newt in an attempt to explain the inspiration for a grotesque and confounding painting of his. This singular quote is the namesake for Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle , and embodies the leitmotif...

Human Condition in Cat's Cradle Mitchell Smith 12th Grade

Understanding ourselves and the surroundings that shape us is no small feat. Sci-fi novels time and time again have attempted to address such topics by manipulating and distorting the future in a different light. But Kurt Vonnegut takes a...

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Kurt Vonnegut Explains “How to Write With Style”

in Writing | November 10th, 2014 10 Comments

If you feel the need for tips on devel­op­ing a writ­ing style, you prob­a­bly don’t look right to the Insti­tute of Elec­tri­cal and Elec­tron­ics Engi­neers’ jour­nal  Trans­ac­tions on Pro­fes­sion­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions . You cer­tain­ly don’t open such a pub­li­ca­tion expect­ing such tips from nov­el­ist Kurt Von­negut, a writer with a style of his own if ever there was one.

But in a 1980 issue, the author of  Slaugh­ter­house-Five ,  Jail­bird , and  Cat’s Cra­dle   does indeed appear with advice on “how to put your style and per­son­al­i­ty into every­thing you write.” What’s more, he does it in an ad, part of a series from the Inter­na­tion­al Paper Com­pa­ny called “The Pow­er of the Print­ed Word,” osten­si­bly meant to address the need, now that “the print­ed word is more vital than ever,” for “all of us to  read bet­ter,  write bet­ter, and  com­mu­ni­cate bet­ter.”

This arguably holds much truer now, giv­en the explo­sion of tex­tu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion over the inter­net, than it did in 1980. And so which of Von­negut’s words of wis­dom can still help us con­vey our words of wis­dom? You can read the full PDF of this two-page piece of ad-uca­tion here , but some excerpt­ed points fol­low:

• Find a sub­ject you care about. “ Find a sub­ject you care about and which you in your heart feel oth­ers should care about. It is this gen­uine car­ing, and not your games with lan­guage, which will be the most com­pelling and seduc­tive ele­ment in your style. I am not urg­ing you to write a nov­el, by the way — although I would 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.”
• Keep it sim­ple. “As for your use of lan­guage: 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.”
• Sound like your­self.  “Eng­lish was 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 unor­na­men­tal as a mon­key wrench. [ … ] No mat­ter what your first lan­guage, you should trea­sure it all your life. If it hap­pens to not be stan­dard Eng­lish, and if it shows itself when your write 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?”
• Say what you mean.  “My teach­ers wished me to write accu­rate­ly, always select­ing the most effec­tive words, and relat­ing the words to one anoth­er unam­bigu­ous­ly, rigid­ly, like parts of a machine. 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 any 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. 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.”

While easy to remem­ber, Von­negut’s plain­spo­ken rules could well take an entire career to mas­ter. I’ll cer­tain­ly keep writ­ing on the sub­jects I care most about — many of them on dis­play right here on Open Cul­ture — keep­ing it as sim­ple as I can bear, say­ing what I mean, and sound­ing like… well, a root­less west-coast­er, I sup­pose, but one ques­tion sticks in my mind: which cor­po­ra­tion will step up today to turn out writ­ing advice from our most esteemed men and women of let­ters?

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Toni Mor­ri­son Dis­pens­es Writ­ing Wis­dom in 1993 Paris Review Inter­view

Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

Ray Brad­bury Offers 12 Essen­tial Writ­ing Tips and Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture Saves Civ­i­liza­tion

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

The Best Writ­ing Advice Pico Iyer Ever Received

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer . Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book .

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (10) |

Related posts:

Comments (10), 10 comments so far.

I’ve always loved to write. I enjoyed ur advice.I’m 46 I’m inter­est­ed in writ­ing every­body tells me that a I’m a great poet my sis­ter says she does­n’t believe or she does­n’t under­stand why I have I haven’t con­tin­ued on my jour­ney with this.I’ve always been a self sab­o­tage sort of per­son. Well let me just tell u, thanks ur giv­ing me great mate­r­i­al and easy to under­stand.

Oh, what a gem! I used a whole series of these posters in my first year of teach­ing (1980). Still great advice.

Great advice, esp. sound like your­self — not easy to devel­op your own voice as a writer.

“which cor­po­ra­tion will step up today to turn out writ­ing advice from our most esteemed men and women of let­ters?”

Which cor­po­ra­tion? Who needs them; we’ve got Open Cul­ture!

I love Von­negut, and I real­ly enjoyed this arti­cle. Great advice!

As a writer, I find I always feel com­fort­ed by Von­negut in some strange way. As if he were the benev­o­lent uncle of authors.

i need an easy essey about mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy

Help! My voice works in short sto­ries, but it’s chop­py. I like it that way, but my dream is to write a nov­el, and I dont know how to imple­ment my voice into a nov­el. How do i do this? Thanks!

Hey Han­nah. I know your com­ment is almost a year old, but here goes noth­ing: Write 12 dif­fer­ent short sto­ries about the same char­ac­ter. Con­grats, you just wrote a 12-chap­ter nov­el using your voice.

Hey ajts! Your advice is over two years old. But what a won­der­ful advice. I have thought about it. Chap­ters = dif­fer­ent short sto­ries about the same char­ac­ter. Won­der­ful!

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A Summary and Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Harrison Bergeron’ is a 1961 short story by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007). The story can be categorised as ‘dystopian satire’ or a ‘satirical dystopian story’, but we’ll say more about these labels in a moment. The action of the story takes place in the future America of 2081, where everyone has been made truly equal, physically, mentally, and aesthetically.

Plot summary

The story is set in the United States in 2081. True equality has finally been achieved: nobody is allowed to be stronger, more beautiful, or more intelligent than anyone else, so people who are deemed to have an unfair advantage are forced by law to use ‘handicaps’ which limit their powers or talents. A Handicapper General, named Diana Moon Glampers, is in charge of ensuring everyone obeys the law and wears their assigned handicaps at all times.

The story focuses on a couple, George and Hazel Bergeron, whose fourteen-year-old son Harrison is taken away so that he can be ‘handicapped’ because he is abnormally strong and intelligent. George is of above-average intelligence so is forced to wear earpieces which transmit distracting noises every twenty seconds, so that he cannot concentrate or, or think about things, for too long and thus use his intellect to his advantage.

George also carries forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, hung around his neck, to reduce his natural athleticism. When his wife suggests opening a hole in the bottom of the bag and removing some of the lead balls, because she can see how worn-out he is, he reminds her that such a crime carries a prison sentence and a fine.

George and Hazel watch ballerinas dancing on television, but George is unimpressed by them, since they aren’t very good: no more than average, at least, because they are not allowed to be supremely gifted at ballet. The naturally attractive dancers, like other beautiful people in society, are forced to wear masks which make them look less attractive.

The ballet show is interrupted by a live news broadcast, which reveals that their son, Harrison Bergeron, has escaped from jail, where he had been held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. Harrison enters the studios where the ballerinas are dancing, and tears off the handicaps he has been made to wear, which include a red rubber ball for a nose (like a clown) to make him look less handsome, and a large pair of headphones rather than the small radio his father is made to wear.

Harrison then announces that he will become emperor of the world, and asks for a woman to claim her prize as his empress. One of the beautiful ballerinas steps forward, and he removes her mask and frees her of her handicaps. He does the same to the other dancers and the musicians, and orders them to play good music.

Harrison and the dancer then ascend to the ceiling, floating above the ground, and exchange a long kiss. At that moment, Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, arrives and shoots them both dead, before ordering the dancers and musicians to put their handicaps back on.

George, who was in the kitchen getting himself a beer, misses the killing of his own son live on television, while Hazel, owing to her low intelligence, almost immediately forgets what she has seen.

This story is satirical, but what precisely is Vonnegut satirising in ‘Harrison Bergeron’? Is he taking aim at the idea of state-mandated equity, which forces everyone to be mediocre, in order to show the absurdity of such a notion? Or is he, in fact, satirising those who would oppose attempts to level the playing field for everyone?

This latter interpretation is not as unlikely as it may first appear. The first thing to establish is that Kurt Vonnegut was aware of the dangers of government overreach, and the future society depicted in ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is clearly one in which the state has too much power over the individual. They can force people to carry bags of bullets around their necks to disadvantage them physically, and even prevent them from thinking too much. People are fed a diet of mediocre television to keep them docile and compliant.

This aspect of ‘Harrison Bergeron’ reads almost like a more extreme version of Ray Bradbury’s dystopias of the 1950s: not just Fahrenheit 451 , in which books are banned because the government wants to keep everyone stupid and passive, but Bradbury’s short story ‘ The Pedestrian ’, in which the police threaten to arrest a lone man walking the streets of an evening because he isn’t sitting in front of the television, consuming a diet of cultural dross, like everyone else.

But the other key theme in Vonnegut’s story, besides government overreach and the state’s attempts to keep everyone intellectually lazy, is the one for which it is perhaps best known: egalitarianism, or the struggle for equality between all people. And on this issue, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ strikes a more ambivalent note.

On the one hand, the idea of state-mandated weights, radios, and masks to render supremely strong, clever, or beautiful people as weak, stupid, and ugly as the rest of the population strikes us as preposterously evil. Rather than pushing for a race to the bottom, a responsible and progressive government would seek to encourage weak citizens to pick up weights and build up their muscles, educate less intelligent members of society, and devise surgical techniques (such as plastic surgery) to make ugly people more attractive.

In one respect, then, Vonnegut’s story reads as a bedfellow of those satires which view communism or socialism as a way of making everyone equally miserable and poor, rather than trying to make everyone equally successful and financially comfortable.

Such an analysis is certainly defensible when we turn to the story and witness the ways in which, for instance, George Bergeron is effectively punished for his natural intellect by being bombarded with state-sanctioned noises on a regular basis: a peculiar kind of torture. The idea that one’s fourteen-year-old son could be taken away simply for being unusually strong and intelligent is abominable.

And yet Vonnegut doesn’t actually tell us why Harrison is taken away initially. We are just told that he has been taken away: nothing more. The news broadcast announces that he has been imprisoned for trying to overthrow the government.

Given George and Hazel’s short memories, and the fact that the story is focalised through them, we don’t learn, despite the story having a supposedly ‘omniscient’ third-person narrator, whether Harrison was simply taken away for being different or arrested because he had already presented a threat to the state by plotting a coup.

After all, George and Hazel have been allowed, following the application of their handicaps, to live ‘freely’ (at least relatively so) in their own home. Why was Harrison taken away? Because he was not just a little bit more intelligent than the average person, but vastly more ingenious than everyone else, so that all existing handicaps were useless on him? Or because he is already plotting something? The story refuses to tell us this.

Similarly, although the shooting of Harrison and his new girlfriend at the end of the story is shocking, Harrison’s lust for power – seeking to use his natural height, strength, and intellect to become ruler of the whole world – also strikes us as a nightmare prospect, so that the shock of his death is likely to be tempered with some degree of relief.

‘Harrison Bergeron’, in the last analysis, is a story which invites us to consider the lengths we are prepared to go to as a society in order to achieve equality. Clearly there are some things, like dancing or athletics or even thinking, which some people are more naturally gifted at than others. Do we want to punish them for their natural talent, or appreciate the things their gifts allow them to do? Just because we will never be an Olympic athlete, do we think it unfair that others get the chance to win a gold medal?

Most reasonable people would answer ‘no’ to this question. People are different, with different talents and skills. An ugly person might be extremely clever. A clever person might be a physical weakling. A body-builder might be thicker than a whale omelette. And Vonnegut’s point in ‘Harrison Bergeron’ appears to be twofold: first, that failing to accept that people are different from us is bad, and second, that government overreach is also bad.

And it is worth remembering that in 1961, when the story was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , America was still struggling towards the legislation which would recognise that all citizens were in fact equal before the law. The Civil Rights movement would, throughout the 1960s, see African-Americans asserting their equality as racial segregation was gradually written out of state laws.

What this means is that ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is both a satire on the absurd attempts to make everyone the same and to disregard the important differences between us, and a story which rejects the human impulse to use one’s innate sense of superiority (whether real or merely assumed) in order to gain power over other people.

In this regard, Diane Moon Glampers is the villain of the story for seeking to impose equity on everyone using totalitarian force, but Harrison Bergeron himself is also a warning about what may happen if individuals are allowed to use their innate privileges for evil or depraved ends.

At the same time as it is a warning against enforced equity (i.e., everyone will be as mediocre as everyone else), the story also carries the seeds of an opposing message, namely that those who seek to enforce difference and to use their innate differences from others to attain power and privilege are also to be rejected and opposed.

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Kurt Vonnegut’s Greatest Writing Advice

"literature should not disappear up its own asshole," and other craft imperatives.

Today, if you can believe it, makes it ten years since we lost one of the greatest American writers—and, no matter how he tried to deny it, one of the greatest writing teachers. Certainly one of the greatest writing advice list-makers, at any rate. Vonnegut’s many thoughts on writing have been widely shared, taught, studied and adapted (designer Maya Eilam’s infographic-ized version of his “shapes of stories” lecture springs vividly to mind) because his advice tends to be straightforward, generous, and (most importantly) right .

Plus, it’s no-nonsense advice with a little bit of nonsense. Like his books, really. Find some of Vonnegut’s greatest writing advice, plucked from interviews, essays, and elsewhere, below—but first, find some of Vonnegut’s greatest life advice right here: “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” Okay, proceed.

On proper punctuation:

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. (From A Man Without a Country )

On having other interests:

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak. (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review )

On the value of writing:

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. 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. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. (From A Man Without a Country )

On the theory of teaching creative writing:

I don’t have the will to teach anymore. I only know the theory… It was stated by Paul Engle—the founder of the Writers Workshop at Iowa. He told me that, if the workshop ever got a building of its own, these words should be inscribed over the entrance: “Don’t take it all so seriously.” (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review )

I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there’s an admirable practical joke for you. When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do. You can also exclude the reader by not telling him immediately where the story is taking place, and who the people are [and what they want].

And you can put him to sleep by never having characters confront each other. Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. “Modern life is so lonely,” they say. This is laziness. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can’t or won’t do that, he should withdraw from the trade. (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review )

On not selling anything:

I used to teach a writer’s workshop at the University of Iowa back in the 1960s, and I would say at the start of every semester, “The role model for this course is Vincent van Gogh—who sold two paintings to his brother.” (Laughs.) I just sit and wait to see what’s inside me, and that’s the case for writing or for drawing, and then out it comes. There are times when nothing comes. James Brooks, the fine abstract-expressionist, I asked him what painting was like for him, and he said, “I put the first stroke on the canvas and then the canvas has to do half the work.” That’s how serious painters are. They’re waiting for the canvas to do half the work. (Laughs.) Come on. Wake up. (From The Last Interview )

On love in fiction:

So much of what happens in storytelling is mechanical, has to do with the technical problems of how to make a story work. Cowboy stories and policeman stories end in shoot-outs, for example, because shoot-outs are the most reliable mechanisms for making such stories end. There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: “The end.” I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers. (From “an interview conducted with himself, by himself,” for The Paris Review )

On a good work schedule:

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours. (From an interview with Robert Taylor in Boston Globe Magazine , 1969)

On “how to write with style,” aka List #1:

1. Find a subject you care about Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way—although I would 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.

3. Keep it simple As for your use of language: 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.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. 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.”

4. Have guts to cut It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. 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 The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was 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 unornamental 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 of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write 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 cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean 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 authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the 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 any 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 readers 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 really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school—twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify—whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which 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.

8. For really detailed advice For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style , by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say. (From “ How to Write With Style, ” published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ journal Transactions on Professional Communications in 1980.)

On how to write good short stories, aka List #2:

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. No 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.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that. (From the preface to Bagombo Snuff Box )

On ignoring rules:

And there, I’ve just used a semi-colon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules. (From A Man Without a Country )

On the shapes of stories:

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Kurt Vonnegut was nothing if not prolific: 14 novels, 3 collections of short stories (only 1 of which was published during his lifetime), a number of essay collections, too many other articles and pieces to name. It’s almost impossible to be familiar with all of his work, and readers today are busy. If you know someone who might like Vonnegut but doesn’t have time to curl up with Cat’s Cradle  right now, or if you know an established Vonnegut fan who’s read all the novels and wants a peek at what else is out there, try these short Vonnegut pieces and interviews.

“Report on the Barnhouse Effect” is Kurt’s very first published short story. It appeared in Collier’s magazine in 1950 and was also included in the collection Welcome to the Monkey House . It’s about a college professor and his experiments with rolling dice. If you want to read some early Vonnegut, this is as early as it gets. If you want to read it, follow  this link.

“The Shapes of Stories” is a theory Kurt devised in the 1960s, when he submitted a second thesis to the University of Chicago in an attempt to garner a pay raise from his then-job as professor at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For a video of Kurt explaining his theory, follow  this link.

“The Latest Word” is probably the funniest review of a Random House dictionary that’s ever been written. This was the review that got Kurt noticed by Seymour Lawrence of Dell Publishing. Lawrence would later offer Kurt a book deal for  Slaughterhouse-Five and Kurt’s next two books. He also smartly bought the rights to Kurt’s earlier books. The review is on The New York Times archive and can be found  here.

“How to Write with Style”  is one of the best essays around about the art of writing, and it’s only a couple of pages long. It’s no surprise that Kurt wrote it. As Stephen King said in his excellent and short book On Writing , “This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit . . . I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.” Kurt would have agreed, as you’ll see from  his essay.

If you decide you want to check out some of Kurt’s longer works after enjoying these short ones, click  here.  Happy reading!

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• May 16, 2012

‘I Was There’: On Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt vonnegut sought to fool us with his eyes wide open., how donald trump got loomered how donald trump got loomered, white people have never forgiven haitians for claiming their freedom white people have never forgiven haitians for claiming their freedom.

Elie Mystal

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Older Workers Deserve Rest—but the Country Isn’t Letting Them Have It Older Workers Deserve Rest—but the Country Isn’t Letting Them Have It

Rebecca Gordon

Constant sank into a wing chair again. He had to look away from all that beauty in order to keep from bursting into tears.     “You can keep that picture, if you like,” said Rumfoord. “It’s wallet size.”

Goebbels asked me where I’d gotten the working title [of a pageant called “Last Full Measure”], so I made a translation for him of the entire Gettysburg Address.     He read it, his lips moving all the time. “You know,” he said to me, “this is a very fine piece of propaganda…. Do you miss America?”     “I miss the mountains, the rivers, the broad plains, the forests,” I said. “But I could never be happy there with the Jews in charge of everything.”     “They will be taken care of in due time,” he said.     “I live for that day—my wife and I live for that day,” I said.     “How is your wife?” he said.     “Blooming, thank you,” I said.

Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?” Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.

The colonel coughed and coughed, and then he said to Billy, “You one of my boys?” This was a man who had lost an entire regiment, about forty-five hundred men—a lot of them children, actually. Billy didn’t reply. The question made no sense.     “What was your outfit?” said the colonel. He coughed and coughed. Every time he inhaled his lungs rattled like greasy paper bags.     Billy couldn’t remember the outfit he was from.     “You from the Four-fifty-first?”     “Four-fifty-first what?” said Billy.     There was a silence. “Infantry regiment,” said the colonel at last.     “Oh,” said Billy Pilgrim.     There was another long silence, with the colonel dying and dying, drowning where he stood. And then he cried out wetly, “It’s me, boys! It’s Wild Bob!”

“For fear that a lot of bleeding hearts…might not think it was such a wonderful thing to do.”     It was now that Billy Pilgrim spoke up intelligently. “I was there,” he said.

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