Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story

When it came to giv­ing advice to writ­ers, Kurt Von­negut was nev­er dull. He once tried to warn peo­ple away from using semi­colons by char­ac­ter­iz­ing them as “trans­ves­tite her­maph­ro­dites rep­re­sent­ing absolute­ly noth­ing.” And, in a mas­ter’s the­sis reject­ed by The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, he made the tan­ta­liz­ing argu­ment that “sto­ries have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a giv­en society’s sto­ries is at least as inter­est­ing as the shape of its pots or spear­heads.” In this brief video, Von­negut offers eight essen­tial tips on how to write a short sto­ry:

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.

Von­negut put down his advice in the intro­duc­tion to his 1999 col­lec­tion of mag­a­zine sto­ries, Bagom­bo Snuff Box. But for every rule (well, almost every rule) there is an excep­tion. “The great­est Amer­i­can short sto­ry writer of my gen­er­a­tion was Flan­nery O’Con­nor,” writes Von­negut. “She broke prac­ti­cal­ly every one of my rules but the first. Great writ­ers tend to do that.”

Now if you want to learn to write with style, that’s anoth­er sto­ry. And Von­negut has advice on that too here.

via Brain­Pick­ings

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