Chapter 23

The Mother of All Pearls

Picture a huge, luminescent pearl, its gleam so great that its glow prevails over all the lesser pearls nestled around it.

Well, here is the Mother of All Pearls of wisdom that Kurt offered us at Iowa on the nuts and bolts of writing fiction:

You’re in the entertainment business.

He stood in front of the class, shaking his head over someone’s story, as he said that. Many times.

This was startling to hear. “Entertainment business” implied Hollywood, with its crass glitter and flash.

I myself wasn’t thinking about entertaining anyone. I just wanted to get sorrow and outrage off my chest. Everyone in the workshop had things to get off their chests. Our instructors did too. It seemed that Kurt had the most. He was writing Slaughterhouse-Five. We knew his firebombing, prisoner-of-war backstory.

These were soul-scouring experiences. And we were in the entertainment business?

Eventually I understood he meant this: You have to play by the rules of the game of fiction well enough so that you can get across what is in the rag-and-bone shop of your heart. You have to be like a magician or pickpocket, distracting the audience by entertaining, while you are really saying those things you most want to say.

At a party recently, I told two MFA candidates that this was Kurt’s most important advice. They stared at me, aghast.

One of the hardest lessons for novice writers to realize is that caring alone, no matter what you’ve been through or what story you have to tell, doesn’t matter in terms of rendering the successful creation of your work. It’s not your story that matters. It’s how you tell it.

Vonnegut knew the distinction between spinning a yarn and the voltage that caused the yarn to spin, between the self and the persona. Of all he taught about writing, what he said about the “entertainment business,” I would come to discover, was the most complex and important.

In Player Piano, a character exclaims,

I mean, Christ, boy, that was a show. You know, it’s entertainment, and still you learn something, too. Christ! When you do both, that’s art, boy.268

He [a publicity man in Galápagos] had transformed what was to have been a routine, two-week trip out to the islands and back into the nature cruise of the century. How had he worked such a miracle? By never calling it anything but “the Nature Cruise of the Century.”269

Vonnegut had to learn the entertainment lesson too. When Kurt and Jane first married and he was in the service stationed at Fort Riley, Jane spotted an ad for what nowadays would be called a “book doctor.” Scammon Lockwood’s office was near publishers in Manhattan and he reviewed writing samples for free. Jane sent him some of Kurt’s stories.

Lockwood replied, “I warmly applaud Kurt’s desire to ‘say something’ that will have some influence, however small, that will do something to help uplift humanity,” he wrote. “Every writer worth a hoot has ambition. But… what it adds up to or boils down to is this: you have got to master the current technique if you want acceptance for anything, good or drivel, in the current market. The ‘message to humanity’ is a by-product: it always has been.… If you want to make a living writing you will first of all write to entertain, to divert, to amuse. And that in itself is a noble aim.270

In the 1950s, Vonnegut published over fifty stories. Magazines needed fiction writers then. It behooved an editor to cultivate a writer.

I developed sociability skills writing for the slicks, because they wouldn’t publish it if it wasn’t sociable.271

Richard Yates heard from students at Iowa that Vonnegut admonished, “Never forget you’re writing for strangers.” Yates adopted that line, using it in every class he ever taught after that. “It’s the best single piece of advice I know for beginning writers, expressed in the fewest possible words.”272

Vonnegut said,

We must acknowledge that the reader is doing something quite difficult for him, and the reason you don’t change point of view too often is so he won’t get lost; and the reason you paragraph often is so that his eyes won’t get tired, is so you get him without him knowing it by making his job easy for him. He has to restage your show in his head—costume and light it. His job is not easy.273

Vonnegut calls the reader “my indispensable collaborator.”274 His rules for “Creative Writing 101” in Bagombo Snuff Box, adapted from his classroom admonishments, begin with courtesy toward them. Rule #1:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.275

In other words, “You’re in the entertainment business.”