Writing Short Stories
I really hope you’re writing your stories for the next StorySLAM:Live on Dec 9th. I’ve had some great feedback from people about the last event. Apart from being a great night of stories, music and meeting new people, writers who entered said that it had really increased their confidence and encouraged them to continue developing their writing.
One way of improving creative writing skills is to attend workshops and courses and of course there is a wealth of helpful material on-line. (Just Google and see 
) The following is something that I picked up on a recent Short Story writing workshop at the Southbank Centre:
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
What do you think? I’d love to know if you agree/disagree with this.
Comments ( 1 Comment )
Vonnegut puts it very well and I’d say that he’s got it in the bag there for certain types of short, though I’m not sure if it would apply to all formats of the short story. The point I like the best is: ‘Start as close to the end as possible’, it’s one that usually just happens in my own work, though not all the time.
Omegaedd added these words on
Dec 15 09 at
9:19 pm
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