Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules
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 hell 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.
&&&&
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Life, it was the season of Darkness, ….”
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.“
&&&&
Whether we admit it or not, every writer follows sets of spoken or unspoken rules that govern how we approach our stories. We do not learn these guidelines in “author’s school.” At least, I didn’t. Rather through listening to other authors articulate their rules to express their truth through writing, many of us begin to understand the underlying philosophy of creating a story.
I recently discovered the rule scheme of one of my favorite authors—the ever-thoughtful Kurt Vonnegut. I have never claimed to be a Vonnegut—or an Austen, Woolf, or Dickens—but those eight rules really resonated with me. They breathe life into writing by suggesting ways to bridge the inevitable gap between writer and reader.
Consider the three opening sentences I offered above. They are instantly familiar. While they offer examples of ringing prose, these sentences do something else. Read Vonnegut’s fourth rule and then re-read those sentences. While the books which followed each are as different as night and day, what each sentence has in common is that the entire premise of the following hundreds of pages is found in those words.
Dickens’s audience was not so removed from the time of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution not to understand the dichotomy Dickens established. Woolf’s novel, widely considered the greatest of the Twentieth Century, explores one day in the life of a society matron as she prepared for a party. Austen’s reduction of money and marriage into a natural law carried all the understood attitudes and mores of the time.
Each of these books—and every other great novel—start the reader, not at the entry gate of the roller coaster, but rather just short of the first drop. They set the action moving by providing the foundation stones. Or, in the case of Clarissa Dalloway, the opening nine words instantly establish her as someone who could have ordered another to purchase the flowers. That she did not—and that such an accessory was far more important to her than anything else—leaves us with a sense of the emptiness she lived through in the years after World War I.
I selected opening sentences as my examples, but I wholeheartedly agree with Vonnegut that every sentence in a book must pull its weight. Right now I am in a World War II adventure binge. I become increasingly frustrated when authors spend three or four pages relating banter between pilots. Perhaps, when distilled, there is some “reveal” to be found in all the back-and-forth. Endless dialog is tiresome in the extreme. A reader’s time is valuable.
One of my Works-In-Progress is tentatively titled Mrs. Bennet’s Daughters.
Here is the opening line of the book from the Prologue.
They thought she could not hear them, her little blackbirds clustered around the window seat.
The next paragraph moves away from Mrs. Bennet’s musings to a wider shot of Longbourn’s parlor.
Now the ladies of Longbourn were alone in the front parlor. Mrs. Gardiner sagely had ushered the other women onto the veranda overlooking the rose beds. Their absence eliminated hospitality’s burden that would divert energies best employed navigating sorrow’s dark waters. In many ways, sadness was a dish shared only between intimates. Even then, each tasted the potage in her own way.
The following paragraphs explore how each of Mrs. Bennet’s daughters react to Mr. Bennet’s death. But, these are the precursors to let the reader know the cloud under which all six women labor. Their characters later are reinforced, but Austenesque readers have a fairly good idea of how Jane or Elizabeth would react.
The core is that as we are writing Austenesque fiction, we, as authors have a responsibility to the craft, our readers, and ourselves to create tightly knit books. Our readers ought to be satisfied that they invested a bit of their time immersing themselves in the studies we build. If not for a better understanding of our characters or the plotlines that carry our readers’ imaginations to new planes, why write?
&&&&
The 2023 Remastered edition of In Plain Sight will shortly be available in e-book, KindleUnlimited, paperback, and Audible. Please enjoy this excerpt which does, I believe, closely follow Vonnegut’s fourth rule.
This excerpt of In Plain Sight is © 2020 by Donald P. Jacobson. Reproduction is prohibited. Published in the United States of America.
&&&&
As epiphanies went, Elizabeth would have to ask Mary or Edward whether William’s pronouncements in the glade were on par with Saul of Tarsus’s visions on the road to Damascus. Like the Biblical latter, the former resonated with such power that her world tilted on its axis.
As a young girl, she had entertained notions of love at first sight. Lizzy was too much her father’s daughter to view such fanciful inclinations with anything but skepticism.
I believe Papa considers himself a victim of “instant infatuation.” That, sadly, has fed twenty-five years of cynical behavior on his part. My heart tells me that this is something thoroughly different. There is a bubble of happiness that has unsettled my core. Perhaps…perhaps…
Here before her knelt a man who, by every measure she had ever known, was a danger to her person and an insult to her station. William Smith was not just beneath her but as far from Lizzy’s original class as the distance from the moon to the lowest level of a Welsh tin mine.
None of that mattered.
What had begun in the Netherfield barnyard and renewed itself on the Mimram River Road had evolved into something more burnished during those Dower House days. Like a bronze battering ram, that understanding crashed through Elizabeth’s last reserves.
There was a goodness about William Smith that shone through the scales of his crime—the contours of which she did not know. His nobility, his treasuring of her shabby virtue, led her to try to see beyond easy labels.
His earnest gaze swept away all notions, all bias.
Elizabeth’s awareness faded as she replayed each interaction from that first through the waltz to their flight to Egypt beneath the straw piled atop Longbourn’s wagon. Flashes of his jawline as she had nestled in his arms during their dance, his profile as he stared out the window at Longbourn’s fields, and his natural scent redolent of musk that weakened her knees—all carried her from this plane.
The rest of her world receded.
Elizabeth needed to understand this new state of being! How had she arrived here? She felt as though great slabs of a snowy cornice had fractured and slid down to bury her in an avalanche of emotion. Even more profound was the grainy bedrock left exposed on the steep pitch above, a new foundation for her future.
These past months had stripped Lizzy to her essentials. No longer was she Elizabeth Rose Bennet, gentlewoman. She had been broken and reshaped to a mighty purpose: to be what she was meant to be and not what others insisted she should be. She was now simply Lizzy Bennet, a woman in love with a man. That defined her.
William Smith had been the glue to repair her through those sennights of uncertainty in the Dower House to that awful moment when everything collapsed around her head the night of the Netherfield ball. The scars that crisscrossed her heart were glorious, highlighted in gold, the result of the tender hand of a kintsugi master. All could see and understand the woman she was now.
The purity of her comprehension was glorious!
She pulled in a vast draught of air, so full of the land’s freshness that it burst with life itself. ’Twas as if she were a babe, freshly birthed! Fresh from the womb, her eyes opened, and her ears unstopped. She saw and heard as if for the first time!
***
Smith had watched those chocolate pools as they lost focus when her contemplations turned inward. Elizabeth stood and floated on elvish feet across the dell to stop and stand above the limpid pool, arms wrapped around her narrow waist, head dipped, hiding those incredible eyes beneath her bonnet’s brim. Her study was so immaculate that Smith assayed that he could have crossed to her side without her noticing to tuck an errant tendril that had escaped her chapeau’s confines in place.
At first, William feared that her reverie might lead her to slip and fall on the foam-dampened tufts that lapped over the lip. Yet, he allowed her to be the mistress of her fate, tamping down his old inclinations to protect one and all in his circle.
Time slowed as the woodland sylph inhaled a massive breath.
A single leaf broke free of a branch high above the pool, rode along invisible currents swirling above the waters, and landed on the membrane that separated the two elements.
Its brown spikes shivered reality before the sprig disappeared into the small flume leading toward the Derwent. The universe surrounding the two poles had forever changed with its passage.
Her sigh drew his attention.
Elizabeth had turned to him; her rosy lips parted to reveal perfectly shaped, pearl-bud teeth. Her soprano laughter bounced around their paradise.
All pain and fear flowed away in the face of her happiness. Smith immediately understood that she had broken free of the last chains binding her to her ancient life. With that, he knew that she had accepted who he had been, how he had been broken and reshaped, and that she would have to wait for him.
That she would wait for him.
***
The moment stretched into eternity, so timeless was the clearing. As if in a dream, Lizzy had returned to his side to hold her hand down before him, urging him to stand, to accept her embrace. Lips raised and lowered established the communion that had been incipient for months but now was confirmed in seconds. Then she drew back to demurely tattoo her thumbs upon his shirtfront.
Elizabeth patted a hand upon his chest, a smile playing upon her delightfully swollen lips. “I know, dear man, that you have been bound by your existence these five years gone by.”
“Nearly six,” his voice rumbled next to her ear.
“Six then. You have had considerable time to contemplate what led to your downfall. Much of what you have learned has become ingrained like this stain that darkens my hands.” Lizzy held up the offending members.
She continued, “My revelations are much younger, mere infants compared to your lofty conclusions.
“I must give voice to them, or I shall surely burst.”
She stepped back from him and gathered in their hiding place with an all-encompassing sweep of her arms. “Think about the beauty hidden here, just yards away from a farm field. If you had not escorted me here, I never would have discovered it…or you.
“Is that not the way of all things?
“The world is hidden in plain sight, waiting to reveal all its wonders and horrors. The sadness of it all arises from the fact that some do not see, and others choose to ignore what is before them.
“My father raised me to observe but not to see. And if I, perchance, moved past looking at a scene, I learned to forget lest remembrance upset my world.
“In my quiet moments, I can cast back into the mists of my memories to see where my privilege blinded me to the plight of others. I recall a scene where a line of men shuffled in the dust along Meryton’s byways. It shames me to realize that one of those unfortunates was you.”
He reached out to her, but she darted from his grasp to settle like a frightened bird on a fallen tree trunk, its mossy verdure rich green.
She comforted him to relieve his worried look. “This love, my love,”—she giggled at her wordplay—“is still new to me. I had accounted myself a fair-minded woman. You have done nothing to offend me.
“But I have come hard against the confines of my parochial vision. This is a rude—and new—shock for me. I had taken pride—foolishly, it now seems—in my ability to sketch the personalities of others. How ironic that the shape of my nature was opaque to me.
“We can count ourselves amongst the fortunate ones. Far too many of our compatriots—yours of old and mine of more recent vintage—are trapped in the miasmas of their prejudices and pride.
“They are hindered because they have accepted that others have the right to dictate their station and behavior. They will grasp and clasp at the weakest of straws and the foulest of lies to feel more secure in their location upon the rungs of a hierarchy that demands a self-reinforcing affirmation from its adherents.
“And the biggest falsehood, propounded by those at the highest reaches, is that all can rise to the top through the dint of their goodness. The truth is that, for most, elevation comes only through that same grasping corruption you earlier decried.
“In such a world, my dear William, you and I are the lucky ones.
“We have dropped so low that our station does not matter. Nobody will pay attention to our actions. Nobody will care to see us. You and I can be as invisible as England in its millions, all but the Ten Thousand.”
Elizabeth stood and glided over to him, hands clenched into fists. Then she raised them and opened her fingers, their walnut stains contrasting with her face’s pristine skin.
“We no longer have to worry about what we might gain or lose by not meeting society’s expectations or threatening the established scheme.
“We can lose nothing except each other, and I promise you, I have waited twenty years to find you.
“Our loss…another’s curse…is a blessing.
“We are finally free.”
Leave a Reply