Mike Shea, 14 April 2007
These were posted over at Boing Boing but are worthy of reposting again.
Here are Kurt Vonnegut's excellent rules for short story writing:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.*
Start as close to the end as possible.
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.
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.
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.
I received a rejection note from Fantasy and Science Fiction for "The Gray Wolf". I wasn't expecting anything else. F&SF is one of the few fantasy mags that will accept a story longer than 10,000 words. My first cut of Gray Wolf hit 13,000. I took out the machete today and cut it down to 9,600 by cutting out a lot of extra scenes, a few extra sentences, and an entire subplot involving a young slave named Krin who wants revenge on our hero. I sent the 9,600 word version to Weird Tales today. I expect a rejection slip from them in a few weeks. In the mean time I'll finish up "How Kadin Got His Knife Back" and figure out what the story is for "Kadin and the Infernal Machine". Hopefully I can stick to Vonnegut's rules.
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