1. “Your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.”
2. “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.”
3. “As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound.”
4. “Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred.”
5. “If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.”
6. “The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child.”
7. “If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledly-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.”
8. “Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.”
9. “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.”
10. “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.”
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born November 11, 1922, Indianapolis, IN, and died April 11, 2007, Manhattan, New York, NY. Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer and published 14 novels, five works of non-fiction, three short story collections, and five plays. He is best known for his works such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast for Champions, Cats Cradle, and many more. His trademark black comic style and skill for the use of language set him to the top, giving him a cult following, becoming one of the great writers of our generation.
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