Who is your favourite writer, and why is it Kurt Vonnegut?

Who is your favourite writer, and why is it Kurt Vonnegut?

Click my reason

Hey Glorfindel,

That Vonnegut guy`s o.k but uses way too many words.

Oscar Wilde, when in france one time, wanted to know how things were going
with his new book. Wanting to get to the point, he just sent a blank sheet of
paper with just a simple " ? ".

Not to be outdone, his publisher`s reply came back with a simple " ! " .

Keep cool, Stan.

Vonnegut isn't all that wordy. How could you possibly have forgotten Vonnegut's fifth rule of writing????? I will quote it below in its entirety:

Ahem. Ready?

Ok. here we go:



>>>>>>Kurt Vonnegut's Fifth Rule of Writing<<<<<<<<

"5. Start as close to the end as possible."


And there you have it. Kurt Vonnegut, everyone's favourite writer, and his fifth rule of writing.




But, yea, Oscar Wilde is definitely one of the coolest cats in town.

Love that 5th rule!

Wonder what Wilde would be writing today? The Importance of Being In Earnest, maybe?

Never heard of too many words, Stan. Thomas Pynchon is my favorite, and his best novel (IMO) is Against The Day, which clocked in at about 1,085 pages.

Soon enough I'm gonna re-hit War and Peace, then the Avatamsaka Sutra, then Infinite Jest, Cryptonomicon, Remembrance of Things Past, and The Lord of the Rings, in which Glorfindel plays a small but crucial role.

The great thing about a very long read is that you get to be lost in a single created world for a couple months.



N.B. Maybe that partially explains the absurd length of some of my posts.

I also especially like the last of Vonnegut's 8 Rules:



"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."



And less well known perhaps, his bonus 9th summary rule, based on a quote from Paul Engle, recorded in an interview by the Paris Review:



"(9). Don't take it all so seriously."

Dan, sometimes starting as close to the end as possible still requires 1,085 pages to get there! ;-)

ddolmar wrote:

The Lord of the Rings, in which Glorfindel plays a small but crucial role.

Heh! Wrong Glorfindel! I'm the one that died protecting the escapees of The Hidden City long before the floods came and swallowed up most of the world.


+1 to Kozan's last post.

BTW here are Glorfindel's 3 wonderful rules of writing (fiction):

1 forget grammar. (you can deal with it later).
2 Be a NINJA. (Drop into the scene, snip its carotid artery and get out).
3a Scribble. (Scribble out nearly everything you write).
3b Adjectives and adverbs are not your friends.
3c Listen to your Inner Cringe. (If something you wrote makes you cringe a little bit, it will make others cringe alot).


The 3s are all related.The things that most make you cringe will be your adjectives and adverbs and they will be what you will be scribbling out. In fact I'm tempted to scribble out rule 3b. It makes me want to fall asleep before I get to the end of the sentence.....

Glorfindel wrote:

Heh! Wrong Glorfindel!

Blasted Gondolin elves.

ooooh! A Tolkien scholar!

Rudyard Kipling, Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Maurice Sendak, Kenneth Grahame.

My son's bookshelf holds all my favourites.

As a teenager I loved Emily Bronte's"Wuthering Heights",so impossibly romantic, and also nearly all the books written by Elizabeth Goudge including "The Little White Horse" which J.K.Rowling also loved. Later on I was a great Anthony Trollope fan and also discovered Patrick O'Brian's wonderful British Navy tales. Nowadays I love Proust,Rose Tremaine,Ed McBain,Margaret Attwood,Isaac Asimov,Arthur C Clarke,pretty eclectic choices, sorry for going on...with gassho, Lesley

Can't really name a favorite writer, so many great ones, but one of them has to be Sigrid Undset and her novel, "Kristin Lavransdatter" set in medieval Norway. still undergoing conversion to Christianity at the time. Undset had such an ability to describe the character and mindset of a nordic people, essence of a period and place that somehow, whenever for some reason I think of the book, I can hear Griegs "In the Hall of the Mountain King" playing inthe background.

The reason I always liked Kurt Vonnegut was his humanity that he always struggled hard to express, but also more importantly for the way he treats his characters as real persons and with complete equality.

But my favourite author would have to be another man who struggled with personally having seen, experienced and understood the dark side of man and that is Joseph Conrad. 'The Heart of Darkness' is wonderfully written and implies the equality that for a Roman soldier the Thames leading past London would have led to the same heart of darkness as did Conrad's African river, or even the present day Thames, '...the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky - seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.'

Of course a close second would have to be A. A. Milne for 'Winnie-the-Pooh' and his poetry.

And since no one has mentioned Somerset Maugham-- the author of my No.1 most favorite book to date -- allow me to.



And, of course, who could forget Nikos Kazantzakis. Everything he wrote is priceless.

J.K. Rowling

Kurt Vonnegut: The Only Rule:

"There's only one rule I know of...You've got to be kind."

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/01/the-only-rule-kurt-vonnegut/

we could probably trade away all the other rules for that one, couldn't we -

THE THIRD EYE, T. Lobsand Rampa

IN THE CAVE OF THE ANCIENTS, T. Lobsang Rampa

THE EGYPTIAN, Mika Waltari

GONE WITH THE WIND, Margaret Mitchell

A TIME TO KILL, John Grisham

THE KEY TO REBECCA, Ken Follet