Kurt Vonnegut Teaches How to Write a Short Story

Kurt Vonnegut on how to write a short story

Please, Leave Me

Please, leave me

For my heart cannot hold much longer

The feelings that it hosts inside,

When they seep out my eyes they scream

But my will for normalcy remains stronger

Will my lone breath ever come?

I know more than you ever might

Of how my twisted thoughts they work,

If it were my choice I’d begin my depart

But my heart cannot leave your hands for they hold it tight

Do you know you need to go?

As I bite back my lips tremble

When I entertain the thoughts I do,

The temptation is in every facet

For me to resist it is our love that must crumble

Please don’t leave?

My mind is bound

My heart has stiches,

Your needle hands pull them out

When I am exposed you will not like the darkness that is found

Let me show you there is some light?

Please, leave me not

Always Forget Who You Are

I am an 'adult'. My bedroom is painted ‘Bubble gum Pink’, and I sit looking around it on my baby pink tinted spread sheets, on the bed that has frilled dust ruffles joining it to the floor. While I hold the teddy bear that was given to me at birth tight to my chest, I see the amounts of stuffed toys and Barbies that my room has collected along over the years. A poster of the Spice Girls hangs clear on one of my walls, the one that hosts my doll house. I also have a jewellery box on the chest of drawers adjacent to my windowsill, but I don’t really use it. My wardrobe is full of purples and pinks, of skirts and dresses, of lipsticks that are too bold for my shade of skin, of eye shadows that no one outside of costume dress should ever be caught wearing. There is a picture on my wall of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ and his friends that my mother helped me to put up when I was four years old. 

There is something vastly wrong with the picture that has been described of my ‘adult’ bedroom, and that is that it was all determined when I was four years old.

With clichés that suggest things like ‘don’t ever change’, it is easy to begin to question what would remain the same if we never did, and, which idiot thought that this was a useful idea to be spreading throughout hoards of people. This is not to say that the materials that my bedroom was comprised of when I was a four year old are wrong or detrimental; it is more that if I had not branched out in the fourteen years since, that I would be determined mentally instable as a result of lacking emotional development, or development in any other kind.

There is obvious pressure in our culture to ‘stay true to yourself’ or, to ‘remember who you are’, but it seems that the potential progressions that could be made on part of the people following such barbaric instruction come as the ultimate sacrifices.
My advice is the very opposite. Forget who you are, and do it over and over until you have explored so many avenues that you have learned many things that others have not been able to. Be passionate with a range of things, and never define yourself as a man/woman of any one discipline. These are my clichés.

There is no shame in changing, and I think that this is a sensibility that is lost over the populous. Rather than acknowledging the changes of our peers as something that may be more beneficial to their learning, many greet them with sneers, then utter the dreaded remark, ‘you’ve changed’. It seems that rather the feelings of shame or embarrassment that we have learned to endure if any one of us has been on the receiving end of this comment, that instead, we should acknowledge the changes, as a positive thing. Imagine if I really did sit in a ‘Bubble gum Pink’ painted bedroom with stuffed animals and other knick knacks that I had when I was a child? There is no life to be had in that stale existence.

You are a goldfish and your bedroom is your bowl. Your job is to forget, to clear your mind of what you think that your personality entails and instead do what feels natural. For the fish, this is to part its tiny mouth and absorb the oxygen from the water. For you, it is to only do what feels exciting and happy. As for the fish bowl, it fills up pretty quickly. There are only so many castle and plant ornaments that can fit in there before you have to settle for what there is and stop pursuing the new things. Please, do not hoard. Clear out the fish tank and make way for the new, always make way for the new.

So keep in mind that the phases that people go through are so essential to their growth that no one group should be denigrated for doing what feels good to them at any one time; unless they never conceive of change; because change is beautiful. We should always be forgetting who we are in terms of interests, because the essence of who you are will always remain, and this is the most comforting thought. 


Never forget to forget who you are.

This Is Why We Can't Be Friends Anymore

It’s been years now since you smiled at me through the pre-pubescent and clammy hallway, and since I smiled back. I built our friendship on this smile, and others that I demanded from you as I shared what made me happy. I built our friendship on the ideals that we were the same and that you enjoyed my company, and I enjoyed yours. We listened to the same music and laughed at similar things; I cried with you over the deaths of loved ones and got angry with you when the other girls made snide comments. I built our friendship with you, on the smile that was once flashed from across a clammy hallway.

Now, when I look back to memories once lived, I recognise that this was not a simple smile shown to a stranger from the opposite side of an unknown area; this was not a welcoming and inviting ‘hello’ that made me feel warm to my core. In fact, it was snarky, it was arrogant, and it was insincere. Since that exchange, our whole friendship has followed the same theme. What was masquerading as kind or loving, was actually quite depraved. With you I’ve shared news of varying natures, and you have listened along, but you have never loved me completely. You say you love me, and you show me affection, but your heart is wandering to some other place during any hug, so that I am left feeling as though you may not even have one at all.

We can’t be friends anymore because I am not sure that you are capable of love. I have heard you say it, but only in the context of primary caregivers of which you are expected to love. I have seen you write it in cards or texts, and claim it quite a few times, but I have never observed genuine love in your eyes. I am an emotional human being, that feels deeper than is healthy, and you, where the cages of your heart should fall to show any true feelings, instead there is a cloudy glass wall that stifles any real cultivation. I am left asking myself if you are numb, and this makes me uncomfortable. We can’t be friends anymore because I am not sure I can understand a person who sounds like they have tape over their mouth every time they speak about a feeling. It sounds like you are suffocating, and if you are not, you are terribly empty.

We can’t be friends anymore because you hate my success. Sometimes you run over and beam with happiness, you must have received good news. When you reach me you will tell me that you got high distinctions for your class that you’ve been working hard on, and I will smile back and hug you with enthusiasm (because I can feel real emotion). I will bask in your success and share it with you because I feel as invested as you. But you do not return this sort of reaction, my friend. When I scurry over with my high distinction you flash your cloudy glassed smile, raise your eyebrows in uniform fashion and say ‘that’s good’. Every, single, time. Following this you turn to your left and then you go silent. There is no other discussion and I am left feeling sorry that I achieved. I am sorry my success hurts you, and that you can’t give me what I give to you in terms of genuine spirits. And because of this, we can’t be friends anymore.

We can’t be friends anymore because the snide smile that began the very foundations for which this friendship is based, makes me remove any future trust that I may have in you. Because the realisation that this was scripted makes me wonder if any moment I have ever shared with you is honest. You were young then, and so was I. I am so prepared to disregard that moment, accept that you may have learned and progressed. Yet, the other day I turned and saw you give this very same smile to a girl that you have expressed your disgust for on many occasions. Then it hit me, your mouth curved in the same way it did for me, your head tilted to the left just the same, and your eyes reached the same level of squint that I was granted; and for this, we can’t be friends anymore.

Through the First Looking Glass

In celebration of the establishment of my new blog I Googled ‘Looking Glass’ under images, committing to write about whichever photo came up first; this is what I found.

This photograph is because I feel that authenticity is not enough anymore. The feel of the side of a building which has been standing in its place for hundreds of years, is not as fulfilling as it is only after we have tagged our little faces and friends and let our social networking world know where we are.

Tools are really nice; that is a fact that is basic in concept. This is by no means yet another rant that will suggest that “times were better when…”, not at all. I am very aware of the fact, and very appreciative of it as well, that these technology advancements do make our lives work in a swift motion, just like the circular loading signal on any Mac product. I feel that our realities are in most ways enhanced by the use of technology for communications or the progression of systematic practises. We have all been in a bank when the computers have gone ‘down’, and if that scenario does not adequately describe just how essential technology is in everyday life then you need to sit in the room that hosts the server in Microsoft’s Washington Data Centre and breathe in the multi-petabyte storage systems.

However, this photograph is the perfect way to demonstrate how the creativity that used to flow wild in the mind of the generations before our own is being stifled because of its advancements in other areas. Steve Job’s creativity, that allowed him to dream of a world where the instant gratification generation could receive the answers to their questions in seconds, means that those that follow him are faced with the realities of not having time to dream in their own ways, as a dependence on what is available is developed. In this picture, for example, the individual holds his/her (I will forever from now on use ‘his’) ‘smart’ something up to the building in front of him and receives the address, and a little description of the building, which is assuredly just the tip of the information that could be accessed at that very moment; or Google’s .000018 milliseconds. In this situation, a situation that no more than twenty years ago could have provided the stimulus for great imagination, now holds another fact and another opportunity for the soaking of somebody else’s description in his mind. This man could have created a universe of his own where that building stands; visualising the doorman with a small pot belly from the additional meals he eats at home, because his lifestyle now allows for him to become semi-retired, and his sweet wife shows her appreciation for his 40 years in the work force through the pasta bakes that she makes every Wednesday night. This man could have also thought of the sweet French girl who is the concierge and answers the telephone in the sing song way that invites the receiver to speak in confidence, knowing that they will be met with the instructions that they will need for their day. This man could have imagined all of these things in a not so distant past, and he still probably could. The ability is not lost, but the motivation to create in your own mind with the knowledge that a pre-prepared description is 3 swipes away on your ‘smarter than human’ device is where the difficulties lie. Instead of the homely vibe that the imagination could have provided, the man is met with the formulated answer that the ‘RC New York is a luxurious heaven in the heart of the city’, and that is all it will be to him from now until he works up the courage to break that description and make his own.

This is why the technology in this photograph tells me it will break the creativity of the middle man who will not effort himself to break the technology before it breaks him.