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About Writing

My friend A shared this video with me and I absolutely loved it - how to dissect the a story and understand the good and bad news in life in the words of Kurt Vonnegut. Watching it prompted me to look for more advice from Vonnegut on how to write well. The best piece of wisdom for me was about not taking liberties with language a musician and take with jazz or an artist with cubism. A writer simply cannot to that to be understood and understandable as Vonnegut says

If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledly-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

And there was wisdom in this other article related to his views on writing and being an author. In a way, it explains why I struggle to read fiction with the level of difficulty growing in proportion to time lived in America. I was a very different kind of reader back when I was growing up and lived in India. Seeing that many of my relatives who were avid readers when I was a child still enjoy fiction gives me reason to believe age is not a factor in my troubles with loving fiction but my domicile is

What do you need to be a writer in America? An audience! You don’t need to supply useless information. Readers don’t need to know how many freckles are on a lady’s thigh and what she had for breakfast!” 

“It’s OK to let them know right away where your character’s going to end up. But then make your character clearly want something so your readers will have to find out how the character gets there.”


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