The Art Of Short Story Writing

A lot of people find that they want to write a short story, even though they are not a "writer" or an "aspiring novelist." For many people, short story writing is relaxing - it is fun, therapeutic, and enjoyable. Short story writing can be a great creative outlet during your free time, and it can be a wonderful hobby. At the same time, however, it is not much fun to write short stories if no one will read them!

Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most heralded writers in 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. These ideas are summarized in the next few paragraphs.

Vonnegut began his rules focused on what you should do for the reader - firstly, that you should make sure the reader won't leave your story feeling like they wasted their time, and secondly that you should give the reader at least one character they can root for. Continuing with characters, Vonnegut says that every character should want something, even if it is only something small, and every sentence should either reveal something about a character or advance action. Vonnegut next encouraged writers to make awful things happen to their characters, no matter how sweet and kind these characters are. In this way, the reader can see what the character is 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.

Finally, Vonnegut tells writers to give as much information as possible as quickly as possible. "To heck with suspense," was his thought on this final rule. He claimed that the reader should always 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 you could sure do a lot worse than Kurt Vonnegut if you are going to find a writer to take advice from for writing short stories.