Yesterday I had a brief conversation with the master himself, Kurt Vonnegut.

… i.e., I read “How to Write with Style” by Kurt Vonnegut and thought about what he had to say. The highlights of our “discussion” are as follows:

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

Hmm, no. Good point.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

Hehe. You’re so cute and funny, Kurt! But there’s only a boy next door, and he’s sixteen, so that gets into some sketchy territory. Also, I have a boyfriend.

But I bet a petition or a love letter would be a lot easier than banging my head against my keyboard every day…

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

I haven’t read that much of the Bible myself, but I see your point.

Thank you, Kurt, this has been very enlightening. No wonder you were such an awesome writer! I will try to keep your sage widsom in mind as I proceed, ever so slowly, on my own path as an author. Hopefully this will speed things up a bit, i.e., help me get published, because if that doesn’t happen soon, I may throw my keyboard away and go join the circus. Specifically, Cirque du Soleil. Because they have like a bajillion shows, all of which are popular. And I’m part Chinese, so I could probably twist myself into little pretzel-y shapes like those ten year old girls, right?

Wow, I’ve never read SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE (though I have read a couple other books by Vonnegut) but what a passage:

Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet. He went into the kitchen, where the moonlight called his attention to a half bottle of champagne on the kitchen table, all that was left from the reception in the tent. Somebody had stoppered it again. “Drink me,” it seemed to say.

So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn’t make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

Thanks to Sarah for linking to it.