{"id":316,"date":"2011-09-16T13:44:25","date_gmt":"2011-09-16T01:44:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=316"},"modified":"2011-09-16T13:49:34","modified_gmt":"2011-09-16T01:49:34","slug":"thanks-mr-vonnegut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=316","title":{"rendered":"Thanks, Mr Vonnegut"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I had heard of Kurt Vonnegut.\u00a0 It was difficult not to have heard of him.\u00a0 I had also heard of several of his books.\u00a0 I had just not got around to reading any of them.<\/p>\n

So when, more than 20 years ago, I walked into a shop selling discounted books and saw Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons<\/em>, a collection of Vonnegut\u2019s opinion pieces, being offered at half price, it seemed as good a place as any to begin my acquaintance with the man then billed as \u2018one of America\u2019s most important contemporary novelists\u2019.<\/p>\n

Why I didn\u2019t start reading Wampeters<\/em> at the beginning, I don\u2019t recall.\u00a0 But I didn\u2019t.\u00a0 I started at page 53.\u00a0 And so the first Kurt Vonnegut words I ever read were:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018You can\u2019t teach people to write well.\u00a0 Writing well is something that God lets you do or declines to let you do.\u00a0 Most bright people know that.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

As far as Mr Vonnegut was concerned, courses and conferences that purported to teach people how to write well were \u2018harmless\u2019.\u00a0 But they were also \u2018shmoos\u2019.\u00a0 Shmoos was not a word that I knew.\u00a0 But it didn\u2019t sound complimentary.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And I had a problem.\u00a0 You see, when I stopped off at the bookshop, I was on my way to\u00a0\u00a0 Cambridge to attend a creative writing conference.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gee, thanks, Kurt.\u00a0 Could you not have mentioned all this shmoos business before I paid the non-refundable fee?<\/p>\n

Mind you, by the end of the four-day event, I found myself agreeing with pretty much everything Vonnegut had said.\u00a0 Pretty much.\u00a0 I also found myself writing pretty much the way Vonnegut was writing at the time.\u00a0 Pretty much.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I guess his no-nonsense tell-it-like-it-is approach was pretty infectious.\u00a0 Perhaps very infectious.\u00a0 At the Cambridge Creative Writing Conference, it was also very rare.\u00a0 One of the instructors praised my \u2018stripped down style\u2019. \u00a0She said it was \u2018clean\u2019.\u00a0 But she wasn\u2019t sure that it was \u2018commercial\u2019.\u00a0 I remember the woman making little bunny ear signs in the air when she said commercial.\u00a0 And I wondered if Mr Vonnegut realised that his simple style was not \u2018commercial\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have now owned my copy of Wampeters for about 25 years.\u00a0 And I\u2019ve probably read it \u2013 from cover to cover \u2013 at least once during every one of those years.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s still very readable.\u00a0 And it still reminds me that there is nothing wrong with keeping it simple.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thanks, Mr Vonnegut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had heard of Kurt Vonnegut.\u00a0 It was difficult not to have heard of him.\u00a0 I had also heard of several of his books.\u00a0 I had just not got around to reading any of them. So when, more than 20 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,5,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":321,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions\/321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}