Kurt Vonnegut on picking a lane: Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. I am not urging you to… Show more
Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.
he would rather you err on the side of caring passionately vs. writing eloquently:
“Trust your obsessions. This is one I learned more or less accidentally. People sometimes ask whether the research or the idea for the story comes first for me. And I tell them, normally the first thing that turns up is the obsession: for example, all of a sudden I notice that I’m reading nothing but English 17th century metaphysical verse. And I k
... See moreVonnegut’s fifth item of advice is “Sound like yourself.”