[stylist] Kurt Vonnegut's 8 rules for writing a great story

[Chris Kuell]

When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut was never dull. He once tried to warn people away from using semicolons by characterizing them as "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." In this brief  article, Vonnegut offers eight tips on how to write a short story:

  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. No 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 put down his advice in the introduction to his 1999 collection of magazine stories, Bagombo Snuff Box. But for every rule (well, almost every rule) there is an exception. "The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor," writes Vonnegut. "She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that."