How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.551

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.”

A single, core conflict is at the heart of the structure of a story. No conflict equals no plot. Motivation and conflict are the engines that initiate a story, keep it moving, and form its particular shape.

Everyone wants to know The Way. But there is no single Way. There is only discovering your own. That entails imitating paths others have tread, taking advice, and exploring what works best for you.

Vonnegut’s seventh rule: “Pity the readers”:

The point is, writing well, even an ordinary letter or a well-considered e-mail, demands the generosity of your time, effort, and thought. You have to care enough that it’s worth your energy, weighing that cost against the cost of not doing it.

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

You take an issue about which you feel urgency, mix it with your experience, add the imaginative “what if,” and whammy, you’ve got ammunition for a book.

You will be writing about your own life anyway, but you won’t know it, if you write a hack western—or not a hack western, if you write an excellent western like High Noon. Because somewhere in there is the coded psychiatric problem of the author. And if you write an episode for some space program on television, this will somehow parallel things tha