Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules For Writing Fiction

A silhouette of a man standing in a crowd I found this through 9rules, and I thought I’ll share it here.

Eight rules for writing fiction:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
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.
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.
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, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.

Tags: Writing

1 Scott McKenzie // Nov 16, 2007 at 3:28 am

Great post, Eli. It’s especially true for online writers, who may only have one chapter or even one sentence to allow them to hook their readers. I can’t remember where I read it, but one thing that I always keep in mind is “keep the reader turning the pages”. In the blog world, this can translate to “don’t give the reader an excuse to stop scrolling down the page.”
2 Eli James // Nov 23, 2007 at 1:53 am

Thanks, Scott. Kurt was a great author, and it was a real loss to us all when he passed on.
3 Copywriting Services and Copywriter Training // Dec 7, 2007 at 11:16 pm

[…] over at Novelr has republished a list of writing tips by Kurt Vonnegut. If you’re interested in writing then you may come across the list before, […]
4 Bill Hilton // Dec 8, 2007 at 10:33 pm

Hey Eli - thanks for the comment. It got published for all of about two hours, then vanished. I spent a lot of yesterday migrating from Blogger to Wordpress, and although my posts have moved just fine all the comments have disappeared up the server’s fundament.

^^^Hey, look at that - it does trackbacks automatically! Getting Blogger to trackback was like trying to get a cat to have a bath.
5 Eli James // Dec 12, 2007 at 1:11 pm

Ahh. That must’ve been a real headache, Bill. Glad to see the blog looking fantastic!

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