snagle.net

Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
This collection of short stories — almost vignettes — published after his death shines at times, especially in “Happy Birthday, 1951″ and “Just You and Me, Sammy.” Overall, however, I never found myself as drawn into or as affected by this book as by his other, more well-known works.

View all my reviews.

Just posted this challenge over at GeekDad.

Just posted this over at GeekDad.

[Shamelessly lifted from boingboing. (In my well-they-did-it-first defense, it had already bounced around a number of blogs before arriving there.) I thought these rules work well for short films, too, with the possible exception of Rule #8. -sn]

Here’s some lovely advice on writing short stories, from Kurt Vonnegut’s 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.

*which is to say, create or resolve tension.

It’s official. I’m a GeekDad. I joined GeekDad as a contributing writer last week. My first two posts were repackaged postings from snagle.net (Apollo Missions and Hubble Archives and Model Train Puzzles), but I intend to post future original geeky dad stuff over there. Other stuff will remain here.