MAY - KURT VONNEGUT
Born November 1, 1922, Died April 11, 2007. Counter Culture, Satire, Sci fi.
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the great postwar American writers, best known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. With a uniquely unconventional style, he blends fiction, commentary and autobiography. Raised in the Great Depression, Vonnegut was taken out of private school after his father's business collapsed and his mother became alcoholic and drug addicted. He graduated high school and studied bio chemistry at Cornell University. He was captured at the Battle of the Bulge during WW2 and was held captive in a prisoner of war camp. He survived the bombing of Dresden because his captivity was 60 feet below ground in an old slaughterhouse. This experience punctuated much of his work.
Despite the experimental nature of much of his writing, Vonnegut's sentences always remained straightforward, revealing character or advancing story. His work meshed science fiction and reality, yet was literary, dark and yet funny, classic and yet counter-culture, kind hearted yet detached. In his novels he often used the repetition of a short phrase over and over. This combination of simplicity, irony and rue is very much in the Vonnegut vein.
EXERCISE #028 - Extreme versions of you
Vonnegut's alter ego, Kilgore Trout, allowed him to stretch the dimensions of his own character.
Think about your own characteristics. You have a wealth of elements and quirks that form you own character. Think of one of these elements and take it to an extreme. Create a fictional character based on an extreme version of yourself. Who are they? What is their name? What major characteristics do they have?
Write a 300 word monologue in the voice of an "extreme version of you", placing them in, or reporting on, an extreme situation. Thinking about yourself, and building fictional characters around elements of your own character, can be a great source of inspiration.
EXERCISE #029 - Dialogue with the future.
In many of his stories, Kurt Vonnegut experiments with structure by using time travel as a plot device.
Place yourself in one of the years listed below and imagine yourself in a crowd of people, somebody's house, or somewhere else, speaking to somebody. Write a piece of dialogue.
2100
2500
4000
100,000
EXERCISE #030 - Expanding Dialogue
Rewrite the line of dialogue shown below five times, expanding the level of detail, and perhaps changing the meaning, on each rewrite. After the final rewrite, add a line of dialogue from the other person in response.
"I've never let you down before."
EXERCISE #031 - Word Progression
Starting underneath the word "cardiac arrest", write a continuous list of words, each word an association of the previous one, until you reach the 15 words. Do the same with the other three words:
Mountain
Ballerina
Despair
Then, constuct a sentence, long or short, containing the four words at the end of each list.