Kurt Vonnegut Writing Style

Chapter one of Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut himself, telling you he came home from the war thinking the Dresden book would write itself. It did not. He goes to see Bernard O'Hare, his old army friend, hoping the two of them can remember enough to fill a book, and O'Hare's wife bangs the ice trays in the kitchen until she says the thing that is bothering her. She thinks he will write a part for Frank Sinatra, and that the next war will be fought by babies again. He promises her a subtitle: The Children's Crusade. Then he ends the chapter by naming his novel's first line and its last one, so chapter two opens on a reader who already knows where the book lands.

The plainness is the expensive part. Vonnegut writes at a reading level a bright child could follow, and he does it on subjects that would defeat most adult prose: firebombing, suicide, a religion assembled out of admitted lies. The flat register is a delivery choice rather than a limit. It is close to the bet Twain made when he handed Huckleberry Finn to a boy who cannot spell and cannot see what he is doing right, except that Vonnegut keeps the plain voice and drops the dialect. What survives is the American speaking rhythm and the irony aimed above the speaker's head.

Two moves carry most of the load. He repeats a short phrase without varying a syllable, and he refuses to tell events in order. Neither is decoration. The refrain is what lets the chronology break, because a reader who has lost the timeline can still count the returns of a phrase, and a book that jumps from a boxcar crossing Germany to an optometrist's office in Ilium to a zoo on Tralfamadore needs something countable.

His influence gets mistaken for permission. Writers read him and conclude they may be casual, may joke, may address the reader directly. The books do all three, and each one is paid for: the joke sits beside a death that is stated and not softened, the address to the reader carries information no character could supply, and the casualness lies over a structure so tight that pulling one refrain would loosen the whole book. Read him for the discipline. The costume is free and worth nothing.

Give the ending away early

Vonnegut told writers to give the reader as much information as possible as soon as possible and to let suspense go. Galapagos is the demonstration. Its narrator, a ghost writing from far in the future, sets an asterisk in front of the name of anybody who will be dead by the end of the day. Mother Night puts its moral in the introduction, which is the one place a moral cannot feel earned. Move your own reveal forward and see what is left. If nothing is left, the scene was running on outcome alone, and that is worth learning before you draft the rest of it.

Borrow a stranger's eyes

Breakfast of Champions explains America to a reader assumed to be from somewhere else: what a flag is, what a hamburger is, what the numbers on a paycheck mean. Some of it he draws in felt-tip pen. Shklovsky named the underlying move, making the familiar strange so a reader has to look rather than recognize. Vonnegut's version is unfriendly, because the thing he estranges is usually something his reader has quietly agreed with everybody else not to examine. Try it on one paragraph. Describe the object your character handles daily as though writing for someone who has not seen the country it came from.

Let the frame confess

Cat's Cradle stands on a religion whose own book opens by warning that everything inside it is a lie. Bokonon calls them foma, harmless untruths, and the island runs on them by agreement. This is not a shrug. It buys him something. Once a text has admitted that it consoles by inventing, every consolation in it reads as a choice somebody made, and the reader starts grading those choices instead of accepting them. Do the same by naming your story's own comfort out loud and early, in a voice that does not apologize for needing it.

Stop the sentence before it consoles

A sentence that ends softly gives the reader permission to feel the matter is settled. Vonnegut ends hard and leaves the connective tissue out, so the paragraph after a death often begins with no bridge into it. Primo Levi reaches something related without any joke at all, reporting the camp in the register of a laboratory notebook, and both men are following the same rule: the prose must not perform the grief the facts already carry. The work happens in revision. Read your paragraph endings alone, in a column. Anything that softens, cut back to the last hard word.

Office title, then body

Official language hides cruelty inside procedure, and he keeps proving it by proximity. Harrison Bergeron gives you a Handicapper General, then dancers weighted with bags of birdshot and a man whose thoughts get broken up by a transmitter in his ear, and no explaining sentence stands between the two. Player Piano gives you a plant, a hierarchy and the men it has nothing left for. Execution is easy and the restraint is not. Quote the institutional phrase, cut to what it does to one body, and resist the line that explains the gap. The power is in the adjacency, and explaining is how writers lose it.

Draw the story as a curve

He charted stories on a graph, good fortune up, ill fortune down, time running left to right, and showed that Cinderella and a man falling into a hole trace the same figure. The university turned the thesis down. He went on using it. Draw your own chapter on those axes before you revise it, and the slack stretches show up as flat lines. The instrument is blunt, and that is its use, because a shape you can draw is a shape you can argue with, while a shape you can only feel is a shape you will defend.

The author walks into his own book

Henry James called it a terrible crime for a novelist to admit to the reader that the story is only a story. Vonnegut commits that crime on page one and keeps committing it, which puts him in the line Laurence Sterne opened when Tristram Shandy stopped to discuss its own chapters. He tells you what the book cost him, he interrupts a prison-camp latrine scene to record that the man being sick is the author of this book, and at the close of Breakfast of Champions he walks into a cocktail lounge and sets Kilgore Trout free. The illusion holds anyway, because the intrusions become part of the machinery instead of a break in it, which is how Vargas Llosa explains Hugo getting away with the same habit. You read two stories at once: the one about Billy Pilgrim, and the one about the man who cannot stop deciding what to leave out.

Time told out of order

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time, and that sentence is doing structural labor rather than dressing up a premise. Lodge files Slaughterhouse-Five with the books whose broken chronology stops a reader from getting lost in the story. That is the point of it. A straight line would let you wait for a climax to explain the war, and Vonnegut declines to supply one, so the destruction of a city arrives as a pattern you assemble instead of an event you build toward. Klinkenborg puts the writer-facing version plainly: there is no arrow to thought, mood or memory, and chronology is one rhetorical choice among many, usually a dull one. Vonnegut took that freedom and gave it a science-fiction alibi.

The phrase that will not move

Three words, one breath, and they land after every kind of death: a person, a city, a bottle of champagne gone flat. The phrase does not develop. Le Guin describes the related movement in Dickens, where Micawber's confidence that something will turn up costs a little more on each appearance while the wording stays put. Vonnegut runs it at scale, so by the late chapters the three words carry everything the earlier appearances collected, and the reader supplies the grief the sentence declines to state. Breakfast of Champions carries a second refrain doing the opposite job, because there the shrug is the target rather than the consolation.

The fable-sized premise

He shrinks a social force down to one clear premise and lets the consequences argue. Ice-nine is a crystal that teaches water to freeze at room temperature, and the inventor's children carry slivers of it around in thermos flasks. A Handicapper General weighs down the graceful and interrupts the intelligent so a country can call itself equal. A factory town sorts its people into engineers, managers and the ones the machines have no work for. Each setup fits in a sentence, which is the economy Swift worked in when he proposed that the Irish poor sell their children as food, and it frees the rest of the book to spend itself on aftershocks. The simplicity is what makes the outcome feel both obvious and unbearable. The risk is a sermon. He covers it with jokes and with bodies.

Copying the shrug

The shrug is the most portable thing he does, which is why it goes first and fails first. Snark keeps a narrator above the story where nothing can reach him, and a reader feels that safety inside two pages. Vonnegut's jokes move toward the pain rather than away from it, and each one is followed by a cost that stays on the page: a body, a bill, a person who agreed to something. Kundera's account of the comic fits him better than most theories of humor, because the tragic hands you the consolation of human greatness and the comic takes it back. Write the joke, then write what it costs. If the second line does not exist, you have written a posture.

Fragmenting with nothing to count

Writers see the jumps and conclude that any collage will do. His fragmentation runs on a governing pattern: the fixed phrase, the same moral question asked again in a new position, a steady distance from the material. Randomness reads as indecision, and a reader who cannot tell what to track stops tracking. He can skip anything he likes because he leaves a thread every time, and the thread is what turns a pile of scenes into an accumulating argument instead of a sequence of interruptions.

Writing simple and thinking simple

Short sentences do not produce clarity on their own, and imitating the surface produces flat ideas at speed. His plainness sits on top of hard selection: he picks details that carry an ethical charge and arranges them so the reader draws the conclusion unaided. Simplify without sharpening and you get summaries that feel vague and scenes that weigh nothing, and the reader will not feel guided so much as underfed. The architecture around the sentence is what keeps the complexity alive while the sentence stays clean. Test each line against one question. Did the situation move?

Interrupting to be liked

Forster drew the line that catches this one. Taking the reader into your confidence about the universe does no harm, he wrote, while taking them into your confidence about your own characters is devastating, because it beckons them away from the people and toward an examination of the novelist's mind. That is the difference between Vonnegut's asides and the imitation of them. His interruptions carry facts, compress years, name a target so the satire cannot drift, and stop a scene from going sentimental. The imitation nudges. Every nudge slows the page and asks for a small piece of approval, and a reader asked twice begins keeping count.