Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for fiction
I figured this would be a good place to start Writer Wisdom Wednesdays.
Eight rules for writing fiction:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.
The only one I truly disagree with is 8. I’m not really worried about nuclear apocalypse or cockroaches eating my books. If the reader gets to a certain point where they feel they could finish the story themselves, they’re going to put the book down. That’s what I do. It’s not an adventure when someone gives away the ending. There’s a difference between a reader having a complete grasp of what’s going on, and the reader knowing exactly how things are going to end…and that difference is nothing less than the difference between good storytelling and bad storytelling.
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