Kurt Vonnegut: 8 Basics of Creative Writing

On Friday, I posted this question: What’s the single best piece of advice you know about writing? Got some great responses and I thought they deserved to be compiled into a post of their own which I’ll do tomorrow. As a taste of their goodness, here’s something passed along by GITS reader Liz, a list from Kurt Vonnegut: 8 Basics of Creative Writing:

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.

Every single one of these bits of wisdom applies to screenwriting. Every last one of them. When I read the list — which shockingly I had never seen until Liz posted a link — I realized how I hammer my students with variations on these eight basics in each course I teach.

This is definitely a print-worthy list, something you can pin up at your writing station as reminders of some writing basics.

Which ones speak the loudest to you?

And if you have more pieces of writing advice you’ve heard, read, or learned along the way, please post in comments — and I’ll include those in the final compilation to post tomorrow.

And a big H/T to Liz for posting the Vonnegut link.

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