Vonnegut | Vonnegut

Dec.24.2012 Kurt Vonnegut's Tips I'm unsure how I ended up reading "Kurt Vonnegut's Tips for Writing Fiction", posted on Lifehacker. Did it come from a Red Room post? I don't recall. But I enjoy reading about writers and their approach to writing. I collect rules. Lifehacker posted eight rules for writing...	Nov.06.2012 Election Mashup: Vonnegut, Big Data and Prophecy I believe in peace. I often lack it in my mind and in my life and so I strive for it, cultivate it. Lately, I find that this cultivation has been at a small standstill. I know I wasn't so nice after Hurricane Sandy--was inflamed by people gouging and hoarding gas and was utterly unsurprised by the...
Sep.02.2012 Wanna Satire? Are you sitting there this Labor Day weekend wishing you could be the next Mark Twain? The reincarnation of Kurt Vonnegut? Well, you need to know about satire: the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, ...	Mar.23.2010 ...But Good Writing Matters More.... Every Thing Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. Writer friend Dave Frauenfelder loaned me this one, a novel I wouldn’t have picked - by an author I’d never heard of (with the overabundance of writers out there, such is the state of reading these days). It has much to dismay me, along the lines of my...
Feb.05.2010 Personality and Writing On Writing Well, by William Zinsser – 30th Anniversary Edition I had one “go-by” book to help me when I started writing: Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness, by Leon Surmelian. I gleaned what I could from it, took copious notes, performed various exercises with the information...	Dec.23.2009 More stuff for writers... So I have a few more things to share with you. One is Letters of Note, a site of “correspondence deserving of a wider audience.” So true. Here you’ll find reproductions of letters from Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie & Clyde) and Bill Watterson (of Calvin & Hobbes) as well as treasures from J. D....
Dec.19.2009 THE ABSOLUTE POWER AND PRESCIENCE OF KAFKA Book Of A Lifetime: Slaughterhouse-Five, By Kurt Vonnegut This was the proposition discussed at a dinner I attended in Beijing: Western civilisation imploded in 1914, shattered by the First World War. We live in its ruins. The moral certainty that gave us Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov,...	Oct.19.2008 Kurt Vonnegut - A Book Review - Armageddon in Retrospect This was one of the most remarkable books I’ve read in recent memory. The work in the collection is all new, all unpublished - though we lost the author last year. It is themed around War, in particular WWII in particular. This is a remarkable book for a great number of reasons. Probably the most...
Jan.12.2008 Crazy Cat Lady I once took a class with Kurt Vonnegut, who told me I’d never make a living as a writer. He told me I’d always be poor, all writers are poor. He also told me that a character in one of my stories needed to fall in love with her doctor. He compared the doctor/patient relationship to the...