Kurt Vonnegut's Rules for Reading Fiction

[NNadir]

Before the publication of Slaughterhouse Five made him wealthy, to pay the bills while raising 8 children, four of whom he adopted after a sibling died, Kurt Vonnegut took a job teaching creative writing at the University of Iowa.

Here's an account of that exercise: Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules for Reading Fiction

An excerpt:

Suzanne McConnell, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s students in his “Form of Fiction” course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, saved this assignment, explaining that Vonnegut “wrote his course assignments in the form of letters, as a way of speaking personally to each member of the class.” The result is part assignment, part letter, part guide to writing and life.

November 30, 1965

Beloved:

This course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will probably be Animal Husbandry 108 by the time Black February rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.”

As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all ...”

I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Havighurst, editor, 1955, Harcourt, Brace, $14.95 in paperback). Read them for pleasure and satisfaction, beginning each as though, only seven minutes before, you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze. “Except ye be as little children ...”

Then reproduce on a single sheet of clean, white paper the table of contents of the book, omitting the page numbers, and substituting for each number a grade from A to F. The grades should be childishly selfish and impudent measures of your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that you like some stories better than others...

...

I consider Slaughterhouse Five to be one of the finest and most original works of fiction ever produced in the English language, containing the finest sentence ever to begin a book:

"Listen."

(Dresden was a dirty secret of World War II, about which few people cared to learn.) It is even more remarkable that this is the beginning of the book only if you read part of it backward, since the beginning of the book starts in the second chapter. This is a tribute to literary structure wherein the structure tells the story almost as much as the words in the book.

I recently saw some lectures on CSPAN that brought this incredible work back into the forefront of my mind.