Kurt Vonnegut term paper assignment from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Buck Squibb.
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. This assignment is reprinted from Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield, out now from Delacorte Press. 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 for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield. The Daily Routines of Famous Writers. By Maria Popova UPDATE: These daily routines have now been adapted into a labor-of-love visualization of writers’ sleep habits vs. literary productivity.
Kurt Vonnegut’s recently published daily routine made we wonder how other beloved writers organized their days. So I pored through various old diaries and interviews — many from the fantastic Paris Review archives — and culled a handful of writing routines from some of my favorite authors. Enjoy. Ray Bradbury, a lifelong proponent of working with joy and an avid champion of public libraries, playfully defies the question of routines in this 2010 interview: My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. Joan Didion creates for herself a kind of incubation period for ideas, articulated in this 1968 interview: Tom Wolfe’s “Back to Blood” Tom Wolfe writes Big and Tall Prose—big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration.
No one of average size emerges from his shop; in fact, no real human variety can be found in his fiction, because everyone has the same enormous excitability. So his new novel, “Back to Blood” (Little, Brown), is supposedly about Miami. But it is about Miami not as, say, “Dead Souls” is about Russia or “Seize the Day” is about New York but more as heavy metal is about noise: not a description of the property but a condition of its excess. If it is about Miami, then “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full” were also about Miami, not about New York and Atlanta, respectively.
The phrase “back to blood” is not new in Wolfe’s work, either. The book opens with a small racial “incident”—not big enough to constitute the Big Crisis Story that Wolfe needs to get things going, but revealing nonetheless. They’re under water—and it’s just as Lonnie Kite said! How to Break Through Your Creative Block: Strategies from 90 of Today's Most Exciting Creators.