This was a Trafalgar Street Book Club choice by my friend David Bradshaw for our June meeting. I bought this paperback copy with its bright orange cover a month ago from Amazon. We now have an informal guideline not to choose a book over 300 pages, but that was after David had made this choice. It comfortably breaks that rule, coming in at around 400 pages. The cover announces that the authors are “Kurt Vonnegut”, in large letters, and “Suzanne McConnell” in smaller ones. This is an outright lie. The book has a single author, McConnell. She wrote it years after Vonnegut died, so he couldn’t possibly have had a part in it. To be fair, she extensively quotes Vonnegut, but that’s not the same as Vonnegut being the author. A better, and more honest, title would have been something like “Kurt Vonnegut’s teachings on writing by Suzanne McConnell”, but that’s not as effective for marketing and it means that it wouldn’t have sat next to Vonnegut’s books in the library or book shop.

Kurt Vonnegut needs little introduction. He’s one of the greats of 20th century American literature. I’ve only read one of his books, Slaughterhouse 5, which I guess is the best known. I thought it was excellent, but haven’t ever been inspired to read any of his other work. I hadn’t heard of Suzanne McConnell before I read this book. She’s not important enough for anyone to have written a Wikipedia page about her. This is her best selling book. She was a student of Vonnegut’s at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop in the 1960s, and this book includes some of her notes on Vonnegut’s lectures, as well as his other writings on the art of writing. There’s also much about Vonnegut the man in this book. He comes across as a decent, funny, and friendly character. It’s clear that McConnell is in awe of him.

The book opens with a chapter on ‘Advice to everyone on writing anything’. Vonnegut apparently admonished his students to “Keep it simple” and not “write like an upper class Englishman from one hundred years ago.” This made me laugh, since I’ve also been reading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time; he’s very much an upper class Englishman, although not quite that old. Powell certainly does not believe in keeping it simple; it’s hard to read more than a few pages of his without a visit to Google to look up an unknown word; or without having to slowly read a passage out loud to make sense of it. Not keeping it simple works for Powell, but generally speaking I’m in agreement with Vonnegut; simple writing on the whole is better. To paraphrase Churchill, the short Anglo-Saxon words are the best. Vonnegut also advised his student writers to edit ruthlessly. McConnell describes the long years it took Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse Five; how he had to try various different approaches to the subject before he was happy with the result. Vonnegut says there are two kinds of writers: the Swoopers and the Bashers. He said he was a Basher. He would work away one sentence at a time until he was happy. A Swooper on the other hand simply blats their thoughts onto the page, stream of consciousness style like Jack Kerouac, who wrote On The Road on one long roll of paper. It made me think of my diary, which I blat out every morning with no editing and little thought of structure. I certainly pity any reader who ever attempts to read it!

The chapter on how Vonnegut constructed plots was one of the best in the book. It referenced a YouTube video which I immediately stopped to watch. In it Vonnegut describes story arcs as a graph of a character’s happiness on the Y axis and progress through the story on the X axis. Vonnegut, a standup comedian of some talent, had the audience in fits of laughter explaining the story arcs of various famous tales. He says you need to be mean and cruel to your characters, putting all kinds of troubles and challenges in their way. McConnell describes how Vonnegut thinks of language. He was always conscious of the tone and rhythm of his sentences. He would often read his writing aloud to hear how it sounded. She also describes how he took an interest in the layout, or look, of his writing. Just one example is the way he would use paragraph breaks to emphasise a point.

There’s a chapter of self-congratulatory nonsense about writers being the most important people in a society; the agents of social change no less. I’m sure they contribute to the zeitgeist, but it’s hyperbole to suggest that nothing would change without them. This was all rather contradicted by McConnell narrating how Vonnegut emphasised that writers are entertainers. The main point is to make sure the reader enjoys themselves. He was scathing of literature snobs who denigrate those who write for a living and need to take whatever gig is available. Vonnegut had a young family at the time he gave up his day job at General Electric. He still had to pay the bills despite being a full time writer. He wrote regularly for what would have been considered rather trashy weekly magazines, but they paid well and he was practicing his craft. He commiserated with his students starting out as writers in the 1970s and 80s, saying that it was much harder to make a living than when he started in the 1950s. McConnell points out it’s even more true in this day and age. Of course writing is one of those power-law careers where the vast majority of those who aspire to be writers make little or no money, while a tiny minority take the lion’s share of the rewards. It’s the same for other artistic pursuits like painting and music.

So, in conclusion, I found this book a bit of an effort. It’s annoyingly folksy and hagiographic. Vonnegut is painted as a kind of secular buddha with McConnell as his Moses - sorry I’m mixing my religious metaphors. Admittedly it’s hard to teach creativity; most advice sounds like vacuous homilies. If you know you know, otherwise you’re left perplexed and no better off. The whole exercise of teaching creative writing is questionable; If you’ve got the talent and motivation to write you probably don’t need a writer’s workshop. Vonnegut didn’t need one, and it doesn’t seem to have done McConnell much good. There are some fun and useful titbits buried in there, but McConnell should have followed Vonnegut’s advice: cut and edit mercilessly. It’s far too long at 400 pages. She could have said everything useful in a hundred. Instead, like a double album, it’s full of filler.