Better together or community. About writing fiction -- The prime mover -- Detouring forward -- Dead ahead -- Breakthrough -- Fear of finding a worthy subject or a dearth of death -- The last word on the prime mover or fear not -- Soul growth -- Sanctuary -- What makes great art or art and soul -- Agents of change -- Writers as teachers or the noblest profession -- Vonnegut in class -- Heft and comfort -- Talent -- Diligence -- Pitfalls -- Methodologism -- Materializations -- Propagation -- Regeneration -- The mother of all pearls -- Beginnings -- Plot -- Character -- Prose, the audial -- Prose, the visual -- The joke biz -- Black humor -- Much better stories: re-vision and revision -- Eeny-meeny-miny-moe or choice -- Making a living -- Caring for your piece in the game -- Farting around in life and art -- Love, marriage, and baby carriage -- Better together or community.
Summary:
"Kurt Vonnegut used to like to say, "Practicing an art form is a way to grow your soul." He would screw up his lips into a prune face after he said this because of how important he believed this idea to be. Pity the Reader is the very embodiment of that idea, a book about writing and life and why the two go together. It includes rare photos and reproductions, Vonnegut's own account in his own words of how he became a writer and why it matters, and previously untold stories by and about Vonnegut as teacher and friend. It turns out he was generous to a fault about students' writing, idiosyncratic, a bit tortured and always creative as a teacher, and here in this book that portrait becomes our gateway into getting to know Kurt Vonnegut better than we ever have before as a human being. Vonnegut recounts that his favorite work of art among all those his children produced "so far" is a letter his daughter Nanette wrote to a disgruntled customer, after he had tormented a new waitress at the restaurant where she had just started working, and then he shares the letter with us. Thus he illustrates his first writing rule: "Find a subject you care about." This book is full of such rare, intimately teachable moments, and they add up to something special. Pity the Reader indeed"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.