on writing - the role and definition of talent

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when
one will do.   - Thomas Jefferson

Talented writing tends to contain more information, sentence for
sentence, clause for clause, than merely good writing...  It also
employs rhetorical parallels and differences...  It pays attention to the
sounds and rhythms of its sentences...  Much of the information it
proffers is implied...  These are among the things that indicate talent.
- Samuel R. Delaney

There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented
writer can't get a good story out of it.  - Lawrence Watt-Evans

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities.
The other, unfortunately, is talent.  - Ernest Hemingway

By Sanna Helena Berger

on writing - from Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut

I've been reading Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, edited by
William Rodney Allen.  Here are a few tidbits, Vonnegut's
thoughts on writing, short stories, and so on, that I rarely see on
other websites spouting bits of his wisdom...  Enjoy...

"As a rule it takes me quite awhile to figure out precisely how the
novel will end… I find that, as a writer, I share a problem, perhaps
you could call it a tragedy, with most human beings: a tendency to
lose contact with my own intelligence.  It's almost as if there were a
layer of fat upon the part of us that thinks and it's the writer's job to
hack through and discover what is inside.  So often it's this belief, or
some such belief, that keeps me going after a day when I've been at
it for hours and am dissatisfied with what I've produced.  But I do
keep at it and, if I'm patient, a nice egg-shaped idea emerges and I
can tell my intelligence has gotten through.  It' a slow process,
though, and an annoying one, because you have to sit still so long."

"That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you
have to be a real expert on ends.  Nothing in real life ends."

"Usually what you do is you obsess the reader: Is the boy going to
get the girl?  Is the person going to get revenge, or, are they going
to find the money, whatever.  Once you get bogged down in plot,
on rails like that, that's all a reader can think about."

By Klas Fahlén

on writing - five bits of advice

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall
of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.
- Charles Bukowski

A short story must have single mood and every sentence must build
towards it.  - Edgar Allan Poe

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.  - T. S. Eliot

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others
should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with
language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element
in your style.
- Kurt Vonnegut

By Alanna Cavanagh

photo stories - closest to the end

Vonnegut said to start [short] stories as close to the end as possible.
If these were beginnings, how would you write them?

By Alison Scarpulla

By Joel Nigel Coleman

By Li Hui

on writing - kurt vonnegut

These are Vonnegut's tips for writing short stories, though I think they
 could apply to all types of fiction writing as well.

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

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or
advance action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading
characters, make awful things happen to them—that the reader may see
what they are made of.

7. 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.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible.
To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding
of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story
themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Via Huffington Post

By Kai Carpenter

the well written - kurt vonnegut

Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less
interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world:
too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

By Daniel Grzeszkiewicz

the well written - kurt vonnegut

He looked around at the perfectly white world, felt the wet kisses of the snowflakes, pondered hidden meanings in the pale yellow streetlights that shone in a world so whitely asleep. 
"Beautiful," he whispered.

-Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

By Jordan Lynn Gribble