The Art Of Short Story Writing

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You do not have to be a "writer" or an "aspiring novelist" to want to write a short story. For many people, short story writing is relaxing - it is fun, therapeutic, and enjoyable. Short story writing can be a productive use of your time, and it can be a very fun hobby. At the same time, however, short story writing is not all that much fun if no one reads your story!

Kurt Vonnegut was one of the masters of modern American literature. For over fifty years - from the late 1940s to the mid-2000s - he wrote novels, essays, and short stories that were widely-read and highly acclaimed. Somewhere along the way, Vonnegut compiled his list of "rules" for writing short stories. The next few paragraphs summarize these ideas.

Vonnegut's first two rules deal with the reader: firstly, that you should make sure the reader will not feel their time is wasted, and secondly that you give the reader a character they can root for. Vonnegut continued with thoughts on characters after this, saying that every character should want something, even if it is as simple as a glass of milk, and that you should use every single sentence to either reveal something about the characters or to advance action. Vonnegut next implored writers to do the following: Make horrible things happen to your characters, even if they are kind and sweet. By doing this, you allow the reader to see what the characters are made of. Vonnegut's next pieces of advice were as follows: start as close to the end as possible, and write to please just one person. You can understand this last one by realizing that if you write for one person, and that one person loves it, then every other person who has the same tastes as your "one person" will certainly love it also.

Vonnegut closes his rules by telling writers to give as much information as you can, as quickly as you can. He says, "to heck with suspense." According to him, the reader should have a complete understanding of what is going on.

Of course, Vonnegut admitted that you can break all of these rules and still create a terrific short story. But if you are going to take the advice of someone when writing short stories, you could certainly do a whole lot worse than Kurt Vonnegut.