Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style

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.

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.

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

Conflict within the same character makes that character more complex and compelling. And believable.

Kurt calls reading an “art.” You are not born with it. You must learn how to do it, and as with any art, you can keep gaining skill and pleasure in it for the rest of your life.

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.

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

Any artist of any kind has to be able to stomach falling short of the mark, continually, in all kinds of ways. But perhaps especially when starting out.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”13