Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
“Find a subject you care about.”
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
Language is a kind of music. Silence at play with sound. Cadence, beats, accents, and tone.
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
Vonnegut’s seventh rule: “Pity the readers”:
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
Fetishism of famous writers, he suggested, occurs because “it’s such heavy-lifting to actually read books.”
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
You can steal a plot.
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
Whether rigging or not, one’s self and the myriad aspects of oneself show up in one’s characters. The more you are able to encompass and give voice to those aspects, the larger you grow, and the better fiction writer you will be. You’ll meet yourself on the river, as it were.
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
“One way to approach a story,” the writer Josephine Humphreys suggests, “is to think of it as the writer’s response to the most important question he can ask. The response is often complex, ambiguous and changeable, but the question is simple and almost always the same.
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
All writing teaches—communicates something about something. Even bad writing “teaches.” So if you’re writing, you’re teaching. You can’t help it. But then there’s intentional teaching through writing.
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
True action combines realization—when a character is “impressed”—and acting on it in a way that makes a difference to the character’s life or others.