Kurt Vonnegut: Writing 101

Due to some recent events, I've been inspired to go all in with this writing stuff. As long as I've been able to read, I've loved to read tips and words of wisdom from good writers, and lately, I've been doing a lot more of that. No one can tell you how to write; in my opinion, it's just something you're born with, but reading the tips of admired and respect writers helps me build my confidence in my own writing abilities, whether it's something I agree with or disagree with completely. Anyway, I ran across this last night, from the preface of Mr. Kurt Vonnegut's short story collection, Bagombo Snuff Box, and liked it:

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.

Also, my friend Kate sent me this a few weeks ago: Vonnegut: How to Write with Style. Number five really stood out to me because I have learned the hard way over the years to "sound like myself." I was born just outside Atlanta and have the accent and language to prove it, especially when I'm talking in an informal setting. I think learning to write in my own voice instead of the one almost every English teacher I've ever had tried to instill in me has been pretty hard to do but it comes naturally, and that's when I do my best work. And that is EXACTLY what Vonnegut says here (with apologies to Mrs. Yates):

5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.