Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story

I NEED A WRITING COACH AND WILL PAY SOMETHING FOR THE HELP

Hi Eleanor,

First of all what do you expect a writ­ing coach to do for you? Per­haps you need an edi­tor. Defin­ing what you need to com­plete mss is easy if you have a goal. If not then you can tread water until it ices over.

We can talk more if you like.

Retired for five years now. Pur­sued a series of point­less hob­bies, fol­lowed by impos­si­ble activ­i­ties includ­ing, moun­tain climb­ing. Now, being sev­en­ty five, the effort upset my enlarged prostate, and did­n’t do my back any favours either.
On read­ing your arti­cle on short sto­ry writ­ing, I was think­ing, am I too late? I await your reply with bat­ed breath. At my age the bat­ed bit should not be tak­en lit­er­al­ly.
Hap­py new year to all,
Bri­an.

Hi all,

I’m a short sto­ry writer and nov­el­ist who would love to guide or help out any­one if need­ed. I’ve won some awards and worked on a wide vari­ety of writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­fes­sion­al­ly. Present­ly I am a free­lance busi­ness writer — resumes, Linkedin pro­files, bios, etc. Leave me a mes­sage here and I’ll get in touch.

Hey Mark,I’d real­ly love your help and to get in con­tact with you.We can stay in con­tact through Facebook,Whatsapp or Email,whichever suits you best

Hey all,

I’m like Bri­an, a 45 yr old wife & moth­er who has always dab­bled in writ­ing. I wrote my first short sto­ry when I was 8 yrs old. I’ve writ­ten sev­er­al short since then, but then I turned to poet­ry and that’s my true love. My short sto­ries and my poems are all “con­fes­sion­al”, and accord­ing to my son, quite depress­ing. I’ve always been afraid to allow any­one oth­er than my hus­band and chil­dren to read any­thing that I’ve writ­ten. My daugh­ter sug­gest­ed that I take my lit­tle “note­books of hon­esty” and have them print­ed so my fam­i­ly will always have a copy. Has any­one ever done that?

Inter­est­ing… The respons­es are more inter­est­ing, than the arti­cle. Amer­i­cans seem to think that they are capa­ble of doing any­thing they bloody-well like, giv­en enough time and resources — that every­one is capa­ble of being a world-class ath­lete, or an author, or a brain-sur­geon… Not so. Writ­ers have to be sto­ry­tellers, pure and sim­ple. If you don’t have a sto­ry to tell, you will only ever be a tech­ni­cal author, or admin­is­tra­tive assis­tant… Words drib­ble-out of writ­ers, like turds from dogs. They can’t help it, it’s a com­pul­sion. I would say that in order to write, you have to give-up all dreams of ever becom­ing famous (or even good), and just get into the habit of telling sto­ries. ‘Writer’s write’, to quote an old max­im. Just do it; let pos­ter­i­ty wor­ry about qual­i­ty or use­ful­ness! You should nev­er approach any branch of the arts with a desire to become laud­ed or rich, but mere­ly sat­is­fied.

I think that is a fan­tas­tic idea. I always found it inter­est­ing when some­one made their fears/ bad times/ lows of life into some­thing cre­ative and inter­est­ing. And who knows, not only will it dis­tract you and give you some­thing chal­leng­ing and inter­est­ing to do, but you may also have a byprod­uct as an extra source of income and a fan fol­low­ing too (see Diary of a wimpy kid, the Won­der years.. heck even Walt Dis­ney with his fear of mice)!

You know, I came to this site due to my love for writ­ing as well as sto­ry­telling. I came because my friends want me to show what I can do at an open mic night, where I refuse to sing, or share my poems which tend to get peo­ple to wor­ry. I write a lot to be hon­est, but my sto­ries are often long and would­n’t count as a short sto­ry. So I came here so I could relearn how to write a short sto­ry to per­form. I read this but, then I looked down at the com­ments. You know, my thoughts may not mean much to you as I am only just going to be turn­ing 18 soon, how­ev­er, if you want to write, just do it. It takes me a thou­sand times before I am hap­py with it, heck, I am still work­ing on some of my sto­ries that I start­ed two years ago. Why? If I get tired of it, it won’t be fun. I write mul­ti­ple sto­ries at once and many times I scrap 70% of them. Don’t wor­ry about age as regard­less of it, you should be able to express your­self in any way you see fit.

45 years young, lots of sto­ries to tell. I start­ed writ­ing 30 yrs ago not appre­ci­at­ing the cre­ativ­i­ty as I do now. I read what I record­ed in won­der!!! Is it pos­si­ble I con­tin­ue and make bet­ter?

At least 2 char­ac­ters (Pro­tag­o­nist and Antag­o­nist) good guy/bad guy. Your pro­tag­o­nist must have a wor­thy goal and the antag­o­nist works to pre­vent him/her from reach­ing their goal. Start with an out­line and make each chap­ter sequen­tial scenes to tell the sto­ry. Take a look at some of your movie DVDs where the inside cov­er lists the var­i­ous scenes of the movie. If it were a book, each one of those scenes would be a chap­ter in the book. Your first chap­ter needs to start your sto­ry with the Incit­ing Inci­dent, which is the action that caus­es the sto­ry to hap­pen. For exam­ple, if it’s a mur­der mys­tery, the first chap­ter should be about the a mur­der. Have fun,

Dar­ryl

How can I get an hon­est cri­tique of my writ­ing? I’m an indus­tri­al painter and all my friends are beer swill­ing meat­heads so they can’t do it. Is there a place I can send my sto­ries to receive some input or cor­rec­tions?

I’ll take this advice with a grain of salt, con­sid­er­ing that half the sto­ries in Bagom­bo Snuff Box were sto­ries pub­lished in oth­er books and then man­gled by Von­negut to suit the times instead of leav­ing them the gems they were. I lit­er­al­ly threw the book across the room in dis­gust twice after read­ing his new ver­sions of two stories…and Von­negut is one of my favorite authors.

You have to write a lot of bad sto­ries before you can write a good one. Works the same with songs.

Write with is one of the most crit­i­cal steps of the writ­ing process and is prob­a­bly rel­e­vant to the first point. If you want to get your blood pump­ing and give it your best, you might want to write with pas­sion, and give it all you got. How do you do this? Make sure that you have the right mind­set when­ev­er you are writ­ing.
Check this out How to Write a Book That Can Change the World
Hope this will also help. Thank you.

I’m a screen­writer — I’ve sold a cou­ple sad­ly un-pro­duced scripts — and I always start writ­ing with an open­ing scene and a final scene in mind. Then I can tell when I’m run­ning too far astray of the cen­tral con­cept with lengthy dia­logue, use­less tan­gents, etc. I rec­og­nize that I have to get back to the idea at hand because I have to hit that final tar­get. There’s as many dif­fer­ent ways to write as there are writ­ers, but that’s my approach.