IWSG: Five Years From Now

It’s time for another group posting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group! founded by Alex J. Cavanaugh. Time to release our fears to the world – or offer encouragement to those who are feeling neurotic. If you’d like to join us, click on the tab above and sign up. We post the first Wednesday of every month. Your words might be the encouragement someone needs. You can also join us on twitter using the hashtag #IWSG, or on the Facebook page.

Now, IWSG hosts have changed up the format in an effort to make it more fun and interactive.Every month, they will announce a question that members can answer in their IWSG Day post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say. 

Don’t forget to visit others that day to see their answers. Want to join, or learn more? Visit our - Sign-up List.

DECEMBER'S QUESTION: In terms of your writing career, where do you see yourself five years from now, and what’s your plan to get there?

MY ANSWER: I hope to have both written and published more frequently, and widely. To achieve this goal, I will push myself to increase my daily word count. I will also take the great Bradbury's advice and in addition to my monthly assignments, I will write at least one short story a week (or seven flash fiction pieces). He says it's impossible to write 52 bad pieces in a row.

For more tips on setting goals, try reading:

Genius of Bradbury
Vonneguts 8 Rules
How to be a Writer by Ian Fleming
3 Tips to Becoming a Better Writer
Goal Setting
4 Keys to Publishing Success
5 Ways to Become a Better Writer by the End of the Year

How about you? What do you hope you've accomplished in five years?

The Write Support and Vonnegut's 8 Rules

I'm preparing to lead a writer's workshop tomorrow called "The Write Support." The purpose is for writers to come together for a full day of support. We'll have time for lessons, critiques, reviews, editing, selling/buying each others work, marketing, and more.

For some reason, Kurt Vonnegut's "8 Rules for Creative Writing" are rolling around in my mind. Maybe I saw his name recently, or overheard someone else mention them? Either way, I thought I would share them here in case you have never read them before.

Kurt Vonnegut created some of the most outrageously memorable novels of our time, such as Cat's Cradle, Breakfast Of Champions, and Slaughterhouse Five. His work is a mesh of contradictions: both science fiction and literary, dark and funny, classic and counter-culture, warm-blooded and very cool. And it's all completely unique.

With his customary wisdom and wit, Vonnegut put forth 8 basics of what he calls Creative Writing 101:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. 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.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

From the preface to Vonnegut's short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box.

Which one do you feel is the most significant? I'm partial to #5. Do you agree with these? How do you feel they compare to Elmore Leonard's rules?