Copyblogger has released me from the chains of ever having to "write" a blog post again. Hooray!
That's actually not completely true, but his post was inspiration for this post that you are reading at right this very minute. Shocking stuff, I know. if you feel like you've just been incepted YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
Moving on.
Listen. This summer I have been reading A LOT of Kurt Vonnegut. This has led to "Jeff and The Mundane Case of the Dozens of Dog Eared Pages."™
Basically I found a lot of what I read very valuable and I marked it for later use. But after reading that Copyblogger post I mentioned earlier I thought it was only fitting to share these gems** with you.
My dear readers this post is going to be very copy centric but I'm not sorry about that. To all you art directors shedding a tear just remember you get sites like fffound, the state of internet writing leaves little resources for us copywriters to feast our minds, and our eyes, on.
So who better to learn from than the magnificent Kurt Vonnegut? I say there is none other. He was a prolific writer and speaker and a professor of creative writing in profession (and in spirit). Read on, soak it up and enjoy—you ravenous writers.
On the beauty of being a writer:
This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.
On jokes:
...the biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears
Gallows humor had to do with people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There were Jews, Serbs, Croats—all these small groups jammed together in a very unlikely sort of empire. And dreadful things happened to them, They were powerless, helpless people and so they made jokes. I twas all they could do in the face of frustration... humor about weak, intellectual people in hopeless situations.
I'm in the business of making jokes; it's a minor art form. I've had some natural talent for it. It's like building a mousetrap. You build the trap, you cock it, you trip it, and then bang!
On quality:
But [pulp writers] were going so fast that characterization didn't matter and dialog was wooden and all that—because it was always first draft. That's what you sold, because you counted afford to take the time to sharpen up the scenes. And so that persisted, and young people decided to become science-fiction writers would use as models what was already being written.
On mastery:
And what I find so admirable in Bloomington is the insistence that no would-be writer can learn much or improve much in one silly week, and that anybody who is serious about entering the trade had better come back year after year for evaluation, and to write his head off in between.
*All the new printings of Vonnegut's books have this on the spine. It's always nice to know you're holding an asshole in your hands and that is why someone is chuckling at you.
**all taken from his 1976 collection of non-fiction writing and speeches "Wampeters Foma & Granfalloons"