Work on three things today in the lab:
1. Continue to work on, edit, proofread, and prepare your brochure. You should be nearing completion of this project by the end of class.
2. Continue or complete the editing, revision, or proofreading of your children's story.
3. Today, by the end of class, please respond to Kurt Vonnegut's "advice to writers" using what you have read so far in Cat's Cradle as evidence.
Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
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.
Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that the greatest American short story writer, Flannery O'Connor, broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.
While Vonnegut is referring to his short fiction, please comment how he follows (or does not follow) his own advice in Cat's Cradle. Choose a few of his bits of advice and comment, using the novel as evidence to support your opinion and thesis.
HOMEWORK: Please continue reading Cat's Cradle. Next class please bring your books with you as we will be using it.
2 comments:
Shannon Kalia
In Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, the author does follow his own rules about writing short stories. For his rule “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water”, all of his characters want something, either complicated or simple. For example, the protagonist, Jonah, is a freelance writer. He wants to write a book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He then wants to write a letter to a boy named Newt, son of one of the atomic bomb creators, because he wants information to write his book. Newt’s father, whose name hasn’t been revealed, wanted to help make the atomic bomb. Newt, the boy who Jonah’s been writing to, wants to marry Zinka, a dancing midget. Throughout the book, characters also want small, everyday things, too. Vonnegut follows his rule in the book and always has a character that wants things.
Subsequently, the author has the rule “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.” This rule means to tell the reader very much and be detailed. Vonnegut follows this rule in his novel, starting at the very beginning. The chapters in this book are very small, only running about two pages at the most. In that little amount of space, Kurt Vonnegut gives the reader lots of details immediately. He doesn’t build suspense at all or foreshadow very much. He gets right to the point, which I like about this book. For example, in the first chapter, “The Day The World Ended”, he reveals the name of the protagonist, what he does for living, the book he’s writing, the setting, the fictional religion of Bokonism, and how he never finished his novel, which was to be called “The Day The World Ended”. He jumps right to the point, and tells all this in just one page. The author follows this rule and all of the other rules he created throughout his book, which makes the book very interesting and fun to read.
Seeing as I haven't gotten the book yet, I don't have a response for Vonnegut's novel. I'd assume that Vonnegut would follow his own rules on writing though.
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