Shapes of text are like clothing: they’re what content wears.

How do you keep from rambling? How do you “keep it simple”? Take Vonnegut’s fourth piece of advice: “Have the guts to cut.”

One of the hardest lessons for novice writers to realize is that caring alone, no matter what you’ve been through or what story you have to tell, doesn’t matter in terms of rendering the successful creation of your work. It’s not your story that matters. It’s how you tell it.

Vonnegut’s fifth item of advice is “Sound like yourself.”

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.

“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.

You can start anywhere and keep on going and see where it leads you, parting the layers of fat on your brain until your consciousness emerges, reeling your own tape out of your own mouth.

“A story-teller must tell his story in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted.”

The second suggestion Vonnegut makes in “How to Write with Style” is “Do not ramble.” I won’t, as he said he wouldn’t, “ramble on about that.” The third is “Keep it simple.”