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Kurt Vonnegut’s Favorite Writing Assignment to Give His Students & Audiences
A Ten-Minute Writing Activity to Feel Your Soul Grow
Kurt Vonnegut is arguably the greatest American author of all time. He’s certainly one of my three favorite authors.
Sadly, he passed in 2007, but he left us an incredible archive of published works along with a series of interviews that I just finished reading.
Those interviews are compiled into a book called “The Final Interview.”
The Final Interview is a compilation of six interviews by various publications from Playboy to The Paris Review. In one of them, he’s joined by Catch-22 author and dear friend, Joseph Heller. In most, he’s more of a painter than a writer at the time of the interview; an artistic pursuit he carried through his final few decades.
The collection isn’t as engaging or brilliant as any of Vonnegut's actual books, but as a lifelong fan of the man, I was grateful to absorb his strongest memories and the ideas that he most wanted to share in his waning years.
As is human nature, he repeats himself across the six interviews. Whenever he did this, I took it to mean he held that particular idea, memory, or quote very close to his heart. For example, he mentions a line his sister gave him in several interviews;
Just because you have talent doesn’t mean you have to do something with it.
He also repeats the idea that “All the great storylines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.” Several times through the interviews he describes the craft of writing as “joke making.”
Joke Making
I was delighted to find jokes at the center of Vonnegut's lifelong consideration of the craft of writing. You can get a PhD in English Literature from Harvard, and one of the greatest writers in history is telling us, relax… they’re just jokes, guys.
Note: He also has some very interesting thoughts on the field of literature and learning to write through academia. Vonnegut himself studied Chemistry, which you’ll find evidence of in Cats Cradle. His main thesis on this point is that…
