Chapter 8

The Last Word on the Prime Mover or Fear Not

If you do feel an urgency “in your heart” that others should hear what you have to say about a subject, that deep-felt urgency will sustain you to follow the quest over years, stops and starts, the wrong approach, the roller coaster of drudgery, elation, despair.

There’s scientific evidence that being motivated by intrinsic interest results in the greatest success, even more than when combined with practical incentives.102

Here’s what Vonnegut wrote to his disheartened friend, the Chilean writer José Donoso. It’s “the closest he came to a personal manifesto about the writer’s challenge to keep working,” according to his biographer.103 José also taught at the Iowa workshop, and he and Kurt and their wives became close friends. Kurt Vonnegut had been working on Slaughterhouse-Five for twenty-two years. José Donoso had been working on his book, The Obscene Bird of Night, for ten years. José wrote Kurt, telling him that he despaired of it. He was having suicidal thoughts. The writing of it had been wrenching, and now he was feeling incapable, inferior, and impotent. He had just boxed it up, all one thousand pages.

Kurt was on his way to revisit Dresden to do research for Slaughterhouse-Five with his war buddy Bernard O’Hare. They’d been “royally hosed by a communist travel agent” whose bungled papers didn’t permit the trip they’d paid for to Leningrad. Now they’d rerouted and were in Helsinki, as he scribbles in pencil to José along with other news. Then he says:

Letter from Kurt Vonnegut to José Donoso, October 1967. Courtesy of José Donoso papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.

If you do possess such urgency about your subject, dear writer, then, lifted from this letter, here’s breakthrough Rule #6: “Be not afraid.”