Chapter 19

Methodologism

Decades after suggesting writers fall into two groups according to their methods, Vonnegut discussed that dichotomy again in his last novel.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

I am a basher.

Only this time he elaborates and calcifies his original nonjudgmental observation of the two differing processes into verdicts.

Writers who are swoopers, it seems to me, find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place.

Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: “What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?”237

I believe here that Vonnegut, being human, has fallen into what I’m going to call “methodologism”: when someone (a) confuses a method with results, or (b) prescribes for all a method that worked well for that person.

I may also be committing (b), believing strongly as I do in the swooping method, and being human.

To avoid such mental traps, take a look at W.O.W., Writers on Writing, a compendium of contradictory quotes from extraordinary writers on every possible writerly topic, from “angst” to “work habits.”238 It will avert your yen to know The Way. Everyone wants to know The Way. But there is no single Way. There is only discovering your own. That entails imitating paths others have tread, taking advice, and exploring what works best for you. The quotes in it on process don’t even fall neatly into two camps. Some novelists write the major scenes first, for example, confounding the swoop/bash division all to heck. Some must know how their story will end before they start. Some declare they’d never start if they knew the end.

Audience:

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.

That’s Vonnegut’s “Creative Writing 101” Rule #7 for the short story.239 Here’s how he arrived at that conclusion.

He used to write for his sister, Alice. He’d chuckle to himself, imagining her over his shoulder, enjoying what he’d written.240

Tragically, Alice died of cancer at the age of forty-one. Vonnegut writes about her and her death in the preface to Slapstick. He based that novel on their relationship.

“Hers would have been an unremarkable death, statistically,” he says. Except that her husband, an editor who worked on Wall Street, died two mornings before she did, in a train wreck on the way to work.

They left four boys. Jane and Kurt took them in. Now they had seven children. Surveying the Vonneguts’ straits, a cousin of Alice’s husband, a judge in Alabama, persuaded Jane and Kurt to let him and his wife raise the youngest, a baby.

Vonnegut disclosed in the Paris Review interiew:

I didn’t realize that [Alice] was the person I wrote for until after she died [italics mine].

That discovery turned into his edict:

Every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That’s the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.241

He continued writing for her after her death in 1958, until her presence “began to fade away.” He never reports who replaced her as his audience. But the dictate stuck. It crops up in the mouths of his characters:

“Writers will kill for an audience.”

“An audience of one?” I said.

“That’s all she needed,” she said. “That’s all anybody needs. Just look at how her handwriting improved and her vocabulary grew. Look at all the things she found to talk about, as soon as she realized you were hanging on every word.…”

“That’s the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards,” said Mrs. Berman. “You don’t write for the whole world, and you don’t write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.”242

This advice as a method to gain artistic unity is uniquely Vonnegut’s, insofar as I know. His arriving at it is understandable emotionally, because he cherished his sister so. But it seems like another “methodologism.” He didn’t consciously write with Alice in mind; he only discovered he did so after she died, as he says. This advice always makes me worry that I’m doing something wrong. Because it’s not true for me.

To give Kurt the benefit of the doubt, perhaps I’ve been unaware—as you may be, as he was—that I’ve someone for whom I’m telling any given story. But I don’t think so. Like many writers, I’m telling myself the story, the universe, whoever has ears to hear.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote with Alice in mind. Maybe it helps you to write with one person in mind too. Maybe it doesn’t. Do what works for you.