Kurt Vonnegut: “Write to please just one person”

Kurt Vonnegut is an American author of the bestseller “Slaughterhouse-Five” and the author of the very popular article “How To Write With Style”. He also was a teacher of writing workshops at the University of Iowa. In his workshops, he was teaching how to write, how to edit your texts, where you can find inspiration and interesting characters, and how you can turn writing into a career.

After his death, one of his students and friends Suzanne MacConnell wrote a book based on all his lectures, writings, and memories of loved ones with the name “Pity the Reader: On Writing With Style“, so any person now has the ability to attend Vonnegut’s writing workshop. In this article, we will talk about one of his writing rules number seven from “Creative Writing 101“ (Vonnegut, Introduction to “Bagombo”) and answer the question for whom was Kurt writing for  – “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.”

From the early years, Vonnegut was writing for his sister Alice, she was always very happy in the moments of reading his stories. Unfortunately, she died at 41 years old. This already was a very tragic moment in Vonnegut’s life, but even worse was the fact that her husband James Adams died two days before her because of a train wreck. They had four children and Kurt with his wife Jane adopted all of them when they already had three children of their own. Lately, cousin of Alice’s husband, seeing how hard it goes for Vonnegut’s family to raise seven children convinced them to give guardianship of the youngest (he was only one year old) Alice’s child to him.

“I didn’t realize that she was the person I wrote for until after she died.” – said Vonnegut in the interview with Paris Review, (Nr.69, 1977).

And this realization brings him to understanding: “<…> That every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That’s the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.” (Vonnegut, “Palm Sunday”, chapter 5)

He was writing for her even after she passed away in the year 1958 for a long time, till he already was not feeling her presence that strongly. And after that, he has never said in public for whom he is writing now. But his rule about “audience of one” will stay till his last page. We can hear it from his characters in different stories and situations:

 

“You were her audience,” she said. “Writers will kill for an audience.”

---

 “An audience of one?” I said.

“That’s all she needed,” she said. “That’s all anybody needs. Just look at how her handwriting improved and her vocabulary grew. Look at all the things she found to talk about, as soon as she realized you were hanging on every word.”

---

“That’s the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards,” said Mrs. Berman. “You don’t write for the whole world, and you don’t write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.”

(Vonnegut, “Bluebeard”, chapter 7)

 

 

 

 

 

Sources:

• Fiction, H. V. K. (1981). Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage. OnlineReadFreeNovel. https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/kurt-vonnegut/page,10,33445-palm_sunday_an_autobiographical_collage.html
• Humor, F. H. V. K. (1987). Bluebeard. Onlinereadfreenovel. https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/kurt-vonnegut/page,5,31649-bluebeard.html
• Vonnegut, K., & McConnell, S. (2020). Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style (Reprint ed.). Seven Stories Press.

Image Sources:

• [Kurt Vonnegut receiving Southampton College’s John Steinbeck Award at the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton in 1992. East Hampton Star Archive]. (n.d.). https://www.easthamptonstar.com/20191112/long-island-books-vonneguts-advice-writers
• [Kurt Vonnegut]. (n.d.). https://thedailyvonnegut.com/
• [Kurt Vonnegut]. (n.d.-b). https://bookriot.com/10-ways-to-honor-kurt-vonnegut-on-his-birthday/
• [Kurt Vonnegut with his oldest daughter, Edie, in a family photo from his Cape Cod years. Edie, a painter, lives with her husband in a renovated barn behind the old Vonnegut home.EDIE VONNEGUT/EDIE VONNEGUT]. (n.d.). https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/10/06/celebration-vonnegut-cape/RUegb0NmUXBmi449E5TbJI/story.html