falomeet.blogg.se - Short stories to write a paper on

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible.

If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. 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.

Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

He once tried to warn people away from using semicolons by characterizing them as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” And, in a master’s thesis rejected by The University of Chicago, he made the tantalizing argument that “stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.” In this brief video, Vonnegut offers eight essential tips on how to write a short story:

When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut was never dull.