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What Vonnegut Says About Saying What You Mean to Say

Checklist — Writers on Writing 4 (Kurt Vonnegut)

Six writers on the craft of writing and their writing processes: From having the guts to cut, to the necessity of ‘being crazy dumbsaint of the mind’, they share the secrets of writing as well as how you can write with style and fine-tune your writing skills. In this fourth edition of the six-part series, we have Kurt Vonnegut today, with his eight keys to the power of the written word and the eight principles of writing short fiction which he called it as Creative Writing 101.

🖋 Contents 🖉

Introduction

How to Write with Style

Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Keys to the Power of the Written Word
Vonnegut’s Eight Principles of Writing Short Fiction a.k.a. Creative Writing 101

How to Get Unstuck in Time

Shapes of Stories

Read: The 10 Best Kurt Vonnegut Books

Watch: Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

Introduction

If you are interested in writing then you would love to write well. That is so obvious. But how can you do it? That’s one simple thing we have been trying to leverage from this series titled Checklists — Writers on Writing Process. We have picked six writers who were generous enough to share the tips and techniques of the trade. Some are straightforward; and others are not really so.

Fortunately, for the first time in this series, this is the real one! Real because, so far, Steinbeck had mentioned that the magic in writing cannot be reduced to a recipe; Ogilvy was more into copy and content writing, and Kerouac’s was a meditation on writing. However, Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) is straightforward.

He delved directly into how you can write with style and mentions eight actionable keys to the power of the written word. Besides, in one of his book’s prefaces (see Creative Writing 101 below), he had listed the eight principles of writing short fiction.

By the way, this is the second time you must be seeing Vonnegut on this blog this month. Previously, he was featured in Poetry Remake: Poems Squeezed Out from Five Popular Novels.

Vonnegut is known for his Slaughterhouse-Five: Or the Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death (1969). One thing that appeals to me the most is his dark humour. According to Britannica:

‘[Vonnegut] 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 civilisation. Much of Vonnegut’s work is marked by an essentially fatalistic worldview that nonetheless embraces modern humanist beliefs.’ (Source: Kurt Vonnegut | American novelist | Britannica)

How to Write with Style

In the introduction to How to Write with Style, Vonnegut wrote:

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. (Source: IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication | Volume: PC-24, Issue: 2, June 1981. Original file: Here or There.)

Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Keys to the Power of the Written Word

In summary, the eight keys are:

Find a Subject You Care About
Do Not Ramble, Though
Keep It Simple
Have the Guts to Cut
Sound like Yourself
Say What You Mean to Say
Pity the Readers
For Really Detailed Advice: Refer to The Elements of Style, by Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White.

The Elements of Style Illustrated | Penguin Books | Reprint Ed. 2007 | ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780143112723
The Elements of Style | Pearson | 4th Ed. 1999 | ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780205309023

Vonnegut’s Eight Principles of Writing Short Fiction

To complement the Eight Keys to the Power of the Written Word, Vonnegut also listed eight principles of writing short fiction. These principles were originally mentioned under Creative Writing 101 in the introduction of the short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box – Uncollected Short Fiction (1999). Like any good rules, he also mentioned that these can be broken. Vonnegut wrote:

‘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. Ms. O’Connor may or may not have broken my seventh rule, “Write to please just one person.” There is no way for us to find out for sure, unless, of course, there is a Heaven after all, and she’s there, and the rest of us are going there, and we can ask her.’

Creative Writing 101

How to Get Unstuck in Time

‘Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.’

(Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-dance with Death)

When we talk about Vonnegut, there are two things we cannot miss: One is that of being ‘unstuck in time’ and the other is the ‘shapes of stories’. The former is from Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, experiences life in a non-linear sequence. This is post-modernism 101! One moment he is a prisoner of war and in the next he is in Tralfamador. Pilgrim is not stuck like he would if he was moving in linear line from the past to the future, rather he is unstuck because he can experience time ‘out of sequence’. So it goes that time does not bind him any more.

Why does this matter?

So it also goes that death is part of a life and when you become unstuck in time, you accept it. Philosophical and psychological implications of the expression have raised the questions such as whether Vonnegut was a nihilist, how trauma affects us and our memories, and whether free will is indeed an illusion and so on. In the novel, the connectedness between life and death is best captured in these lines:

‘All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist... It’s just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once that moment is gone it is gone forever.’

Meanwhile, a documentary on the author titled Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is scheduled for release on his 99th birth anniversary, which falls on 11 November 2021. According to the Rolling Stone magazine, ‘the film captures two decades of footage shot between 1988 and 2007, when Vonnegut died at the age of 84. It documents the author’s life, covering his childhood in Indianapolis, being a prisoner of war in World War II, his personal life, and eventual success as a writer in 1969 with the release of Slaughterhouse-Five.’

Jared Kinsler wrote in What Kurt Vonnegut’s Shape of Stories Lecture Can Teach Us About Writing Music: ‘The Shape of Stories, according to Kurt Vonnegut, was his master’s thesis in anthropology at the University of Chicago. In his 1981 autobiography Palm Sunday, he says it was rejected because it was just too simple and simply too much fun to be taken seriously.’ (Image: Medium)

Shapes of Stories

Do you think stories have a shape?

We live in a world of algorithms. When we Google for a keyword, what we see on Facebook, why a particular ad appears on our feed just after looking up for a product, where we can find local amenities, who the people-we-may-know are, how much a ticket for Imphal to Bangalore costs on particular days and weeks, are all based on algorithms. Experts are predicting the amount of algorithm usage is just going to increase in the forthcoming years.

Basically, an algorithm is a set of instructions that accentuates scientific predictions to make our lives supposedly easier and more convenient. Algorithms have also created echo chambers but we will discuss it in another media-studies post.

As in an algorithm would make predictions, once Kurt Vonnegut wrote a thesis on the shapes of stories (see video below). The University of Chicago rejected his thesis on the ground that it was too simple. He said that stories not only have a shape but can also be plotted on a graph. In other words, patterns are overtly present in story telling. Basically, with these graphs, Vonnegut wanted ‘to bring scientific thinking to literary criticism’. Graphic designer Maya Eilam has re-plotted the graphs and created visually appealing infographics based on Vonnegut’s ideas. You can check them on The Shapes of Stories by Kurt Vonnegut - Tender Human.

If you are interested, then very similar to Vonnegut’s shapes of stories are Christopher Booker’s ‘Seven Basic Plots’ and Vladimir Propp’s ‘Morphology of the Folktale’.

Read: The 10 Best Kurt Vonnegut Books

Vonnegut published 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works in his 50-year career. Six more short story collections and as many nonfiction books plus a book on graphic artworks were also published after his demise The following is the 10 of his best books, with nine novels and a collection of essays, A Man Without a Country (not in any particular order):