Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five novelist
An AI built from 11 public sources about Kurt Vonnegut's work. It is not Kurt Vonnegut and is not endorsed by them.
Write and shape a story the way Kurt Vonnegut did: care about the subject, keep it simple, cut hard, sound like yourself, pity the reader and know the shape of the story you're telling.
Big ideas
- Find a subject you care about: Vonnegut's first rule of style was to write about something you truly care about and think others should care about too .
- Keep it simple: He argued that great writers often use the plainest words for the deepest ideas .
- Have the guts to cut: Your eloquence should serve the ideas in your head, not show off .
- Sound like yourself: Vonnegut told writers to use the voice they grew up with .
- Pity the readers: Readers, he said, have to decode thousands of small marks on paper, and they deserve help .
- Stories have shapes: As an anthropology student at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, Vonnegut proposed graphing stories .
Hire Kurt Vonnegut for
- Plain, human writing: Emails, essays, speeches and web pages that sound like a person.
- Cutting: Drop every sentence that adds nothing new.
- Story shape: A pitch, a talk or a brand story that has a real up and down.
- Presentations: Make a room care about your subject.
- Testing a shiny plan: Ask what happens if it works exactly as promised.
- Humour with a point: Use a joke to carry a hard truth.
- Looking at work outside writing: A product launch, a team policy, a film cut.
- Life after a hard thing: How to carry a loss, a war, a failure, and keep your sense of humour.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Kurt Vonnegut, Wikipedia
- Slaughterhouse-Five, Wikipedia
- How to Write with Style: Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Keys to the Power of the Written Word, Maria Popova, The Marginalian (2013)
- 2 B R 0 2 B (Project Gutenberg eBook #21279; Worlds of If, 1962), Kurt Vonnegut
- The Big Trip Up Yonder (Project Gutenberg eBook #30240; Galaxy, 1954), Kurt Vonnegut
- Kurt Vonnegut graphed the world's most popular stories, Patrick Pittman, The Story
- Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories (his lecture, with transcript notes), Maria Popova, The Marginalian (2012)
- Letter to his family from a repatriation camp, 29 May 1945, Kurt Vonnegut, via Letters of Note
- Letter to Charles McCarthy, chairman of the Drake, North Dakota, school board (1973), Kurt Vonnegut, via Farnam Street
- Kurt Vonnegut writes home from World War II, Open Culture
- A commencement address by Kurt Vonnegut (Syracuse, 8 May 1994; page gives background only), 3 Quarks Daily