Vonnegut's Eight Rules

Kurt Vonnegut's 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.

- Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.

Of course, there are always exceptions. Vonnegut added: "The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor. She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that."

See also: 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will.

You don't want publication yet.

I recently received the following email from fellow attorney-writer Courtney:

I'm gearing up for the impending NaNoWriMo--I have a novel idea that has been floating around in my brain for approximately 5 years, but with all the nonsense that comes with living life on a daily basis, I haven't done anything other than put a loose outline on paper. I'm hoping this is my year and maybe next year at this time I can be worrying about trying to get it published. I'm actually contemplating taking a few days off of work in November, shutting off the cell phone and internet, and just going into some kind of writing zone--somewhat akin to the old fashioned "all nighter" pulled in college to crank out a paper--but this time probably it will involve a lot more sleep and a glass of organic red wine.

Do you have any advice/tips for me? For example, I'm looking for things I should be doing now to set myself up later for publication. I have purchased a book titled, "Publishing Your Manuscript," which I must confess I have not cracked open yet, but it somehow makes me feel closer to my goal by sitting on my bookshelf.

So, here's my advice, and I hope it doesn't sound too harsh: DO NOT DO ANYTHING to set yourself up for publication. You're not there yet.

You need to write first. And write and write and write and write...

The internet is full of awesome resources to help you get published. Mur Lafferty has an amazing podcast called I Should Be Writing that covers everything from first drafts to revision to submission, with published-author interviews to boot. NaNoWriMo itself has a page called I Wrote A Novel, Now What? I've got a list of blogging agents, editors, and other helpful industry players here: How Do I Get An Agent? and you can also follow my entire list of agents who Twitter (I've found nearly a hundred, there's probably more...)

BUT.

It is SO easy to lose yourself in the scrum of people running towards the prize of publication.

You can end up crafting the perfect query letter, instead of crafting your novel. (Somewhere in the archives of the lovely Natalie Whipple is a blog post where she talks about the frustration of having written a query letter that got lots of agent attention, only her book wasn't actually fulfilling the promise of the query letter, and so of course there was no chance of publication yet. CONGRATS ON YOUR BOOK DEAL, NATALIE!!! You totally earned it.)

You can find yourself worrying about whether you're going to get stuck in a career of writing in a certain genre, instead of actually finding your voice. You can find yourself comparing your process to those of other writers without being able to remind yourself that YOU are not THEM and what works for them may not work for you. Eyes on your paper, writers.

You can waste way too much time blogging and Tweeting, trying to find an audience for books you haven't written yet. Even if you find a community that's trying to be supportive, if you're not in the right mental space, it can do you damage. The writer isn't the one spending all his time hanging out online talking to other writers about "the process." The writer is the one who stays in the room.

Last year a lot of people were telling me things I wanted to hear: you're great, it's just a matter of time, don't worry about it... but it wasn't what I needed. I needed to be spending more time on my revisions. I needed to be spending less time trying to figure out the "magic bullet" of publishing, and more time just writing more and more and more to make myself better. Hell, even if I am great and it's just a matter of time, I needed to be spending more time writing new stories, and less time pursuing publication because words are my product and I need as many of them on paper as I can get, so that I actually have the work I need upon which to base this supposed future career.

Finally, and worst of all, if you work to learn the publishing trade right away, you might actually manage to get your book published right away... before it's really ready. You want your work to last a long, long time. You should make sure it's as close to perfect as it can be before it goes into print.

Screw publication. Find out what kind of writer you are, first. You'll have a lot more fun, and end up being more successful in the long run, I promise.

Fear.

I'm afraid my first novel will never find representation.

I'm afraid I'm taking too long with my latest round of revisions.

I'm afraid my changes will make the book worse, not better.

I'm afraid that everyone else will like the new edits, but I'll still prefer the original.

I'm afraid readers won't "get" what I've tried to do with this book.

I'm afraid the novel won't be taken seriously enough.

I'm afraid that I won't fall in love with the characters in my second novel as much as I did with the characters in my first.

I'm afraid that I'm losing too much time on my first novel and not getting enough new work written.

I'm afraid that everyone will want my second novel to be written just like the first.

I'm afraid that I'm too close to my own work to revise it yet again.

I'm afraid of the blank page.

Fortunately, I'm more afraid of not trying.

You have a million excuses.

Card by Book Architecture.

Just bring a pen.

I've attended Grub Street classes for nearly two years. I've blogged about those classes in what my friends affectionately call my Grub Street "Cliffs Notes" series. And now, I am delighted and honored to be leading a free Grub Street workshop...

If you're in the Boston area, please come by. I'd love to see you, and I hope to be giving back a little of the inspiration that the other Grub Street instructors have consistently given me.

Johnny Depp, eat your heart out.

I realize that my blog has, for the most part, not been terribly substantive lately. I'm sorry about that, but as has happened in the past, something's had to give, and recently my online presence is what had to go. I'm putting up a short story every month on my new fiction-only blog (have you checked out the extra audio post yet?), so I'm still trying to put my writing out there, but my ability to just chat online is limited, especially with our family's summer schedule...

But I still wanted to share with you just a little of what I've been doing at home with The Serious Girl and my husband:

LEGO pirate ship. You know you love it.

The writer is the one who stays in the room.

Photo by Javiy, found here.

With apologies for the appalling delay, here is my summary of my favorite lesson from the keynote speech by Ron Carlson at this year's Muse and The Marketplace writers' conference:

The writer is the one who stays in the room.

We are not writing to support our beliefs, we are writing to discover what might be worth believing in.

Writing is like walking out into the ocean. At some point, the waves will lift you up, and you won't be able to touch the ground. And it won't matter if the ground is six inches below you, or six feet below you, or sixty feet below. When you can't touch, you can't touch.

And there will be friends waiting for you on the shore, on the warm sand with towels to dry you off, and they will console you if you swim back to them, they'll say, "it's okay, we understand, you can try again to write tomorrow."

But it's your job to stay there, to deal with the ambiguity and uncertainty and fear.

Keep swimming.

The writer is the one who stays in the room.

Just the pick-me-up I needed.

by Jackson Pearce

Dad, this one's for you.

T-shirt available here.

The Muse has spoken. Twice.

Today: a new flash fiction piece, CARETAKER, is up on my fiction blog.

This week: I talk about The Muse & The Marketplace 2011, Grub Street's tenth annual writers' conference, which is where I spent my weekend.

For those who observe & celebrate...

Photo found at Souvlaki for the Soul

Χρόνια Πολλά! Happy Easter! Happy Passover!

And for those who don't: a New Yorker cartoon.

Resurrection

Click image to link to my Twitter page.

Audience

As I approach my 300th post, a few thoughts about blogging are rattling around in my head on the subject of readership. I imagine that most writer-bloggers ponder these at some point, and now it's my turn. Who, exactly, is my audience? Are the people who read my blog actually going to be interested in my novel once it is published? Are the people who buy my book once it is published actually going to want to read my blog as well? Does it matter?

With non-fiction, it's a more obvious connection. Those authors have special and specific knowledge about a particular subject that can be the basis of their readership across a variety of platforms. Someone who writes about science can also blog and tweet about science, and the same demographic applies. It's all non-fiction.

But the non-fiction "voice" of an author is not the same as the fiction "voice" of a novel's narrator. Sure, a writer of comic novels may want to cultivate a comic tone in her blog, and a writer of middle-grade books will probably want to keep his blog PG-rated so that there is some overlap between the stories and the writer's online presence. But ultimately, the things I want to talk about may not have any appeal to my future readers, and vice versa. (Jody Hedlund covered these issues quite nicely in a blog post she wrote earlier this year.)

If I write about my path to publication, I'll naturally be attracting mostly other writers. Now, other fiction writers should obviously also be fiction readers*, but who knows if they read the kind of fiction I write. Will the fiction posts get lost in the shuffle of "regular" blog posts, making it too hard to find for the readers who do want it? Might putting my fiction on my blog (as I did here and here and sort of here) actually be confusing and unwanted for my regular blog readership? Because as much as I want people to read (and eventually buy) my fiction, I like blogging. I hope that my posts on the craft of writing have been genuinely helpful to people. I hope that people can save time when looking for their first agent because of resources I've provided.

I've decided that one blog cannot be all things to all people. So I've created a second, fiction-only blog. People who want to read my short stories can go there. People who want to hear my personal, struggling-writer's voice can stay here. I hope a lot of you fall into both categories, but it's cool if you don't.

Readers, WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE OF IN THIS BLOG? What have been your favorite posts so far? Tell me a little bit more about yourselves, so I know who my audience really is.

*If you're one of those people who thinks you can write a novel without reading extensively... you're wrong. Go watch So You Want To Write a Novel and then for the love of all that is holy go get a library card and start doing your homework.

Can't blog. Sailing.

The Devil's Parrot (preview)

The devil woke up one morning and found that her hellhound had been replaced by a parrot.

Today's image comes to you courtesy of the talented Natalie Whipple. About a year ago, I won Natalie's "Dark and Stormy" contest, in which we were challenged to break one of the supposed rules of writing and start a story with the weather. I recommend following that link to see the Honorable Mention and 2nd & 3rd place prize winners, but here's my winning entry for your convenience:

A poet once wondered if the world would end in fire or ice. He spoke of desire and hate.

If I could meet that poet, I would tell him that the world can end far less dramatically. It can end under a perfect blue sky and fluffy white clouds, unmarred by excessive heat or cold. It can end with indifference, with a man who woke up on such a fine day as this and said that he no longer wanted to be married. Who looked at me with empty eyes and shrugged when I asked why. Who had so little interest remaining that he packed only a few changes of clothes, leaving behind books, music, photos, computer files, furniture, money.

In an effort to provoke either love or anger, I grabbed Ninja, said I was keeping the dog. The man who was everything to me eyed the small black dachshund, who had indeed been his pet first, and said that was fine. Then he closed the door gently behind himself.

I wanted for it to pour rain, for the sky to turn shades of black and gray, for thunder to rage, for lightning to strike—him or me, it didn't matter. But the sweet breeze kept blowing, the clouds drifted, the sun shone. It hurt even more knowing that the weather was indifferent as well.

I had a choice of prizes, so I delayed cashing in my winnings for quite a while until I knew which one I wanted, ultimately choosing to receive one of Natalie's awesome full-color anime-style drawings based on a short story of mine called The Devil's Parrot. (And yes, that's the first line of the story as the caption under the drawing.) Natalie apologized for her own delays in getting this sketch to me, but I think it was well worth the wait. The story itself is currently on submission to various lit magazines, and I'll let you all know as soon as it finds a home.

Free Fiction (no fooling)

COMPATIBILITY

On their first date, he explained that he wrote "advancers" for the local newspaper. When any person of note passed away, readers expected full profiles online within minutes; newspapers, then, were in the business of preparing such obituaries in advance. He estimated his office had 500 on file -- politicians and celebrities, the most famous, the oldest and most infirm, and of course those most likely to die from drugs or alcohol.

He saw it everywhere now. He made a game of it, thinking up the obits for fellow diners, the pre-deceased. Following a long illness. Survived by. The highlights of education and career.

He shrugged, embarrassed by his morbidity. Occupational hazard, he said.

But she laughed. She worked in a psychiatrist's office, transcribing the doctor's oral notes and maintaining the medical files. She would never breach confidentiality, of course, but she knew the patients on sight: name, number, neuroses. She played a different version of the same game. Who was addicted to what. Who was the cheater, who was the cheated. What would push someone over the edge.

He smiled. She took his hand. They decided to stay for coffee and dessert.

Naturally, when he started drinking and she let the relationship die, neither one of them saw it coming.

Compatibility by Carrie Kei Heim Binas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.