Kurt Vonnegut's eight basics of creative writing

I've just heard from one of the main characters in the fictionalised non-fiction book I've just written. She's just read the draft, and she's got some iss-yous. Happy too, but I think that's just politeness. I'm not sure what her iss-yous are yet, but I feel rotten — deflated, disappointed, disappointing. I have to tell the publisher.

For that reason, my favourite of Vonnegut's basics is number seven. Because I wasn't trying to fuck the world. I just want to make the dead person the whole story is about happy.

So here they are. From the preface to Vonnegut’s short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck 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.

Maybe I should have paid more attention to number six. I wonder if it's too late to kill her off earlier in the piece. Say in the foreword. Nothing violent or nothing, just a disease or something, jeez, that seems harmless enough.

Hey, snaps for me on number five. I did in fact start close to the end. Woo-hoo!