A Sense of Doubt blog post #4230 - Vonnegut's Rules for Great Writing - Writing Wednesday 2609.16

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4230 - Vonnegut's Rules for Great Writing - Writing Wednesday 2609.16

Just a share today, but a good one.

Buried in work.

Thanks for tuning in.

https://medium.com/@mentalgarden/kurt-vonneguts-7-rules-to-write-so-well-people-can-t-stop-reading-b78281d7e727

Kurt Vonnegut’s 7 Rules to Write So Well People Can’t Stop Reading

These Advices Changed Everything for Me

Álvaro García | Mental Garden

August 1, 2026

Kurt Vonnegut is a writer who knows how to stay with you.

If you’ve ever read one of his novels, you know what I mean. His writing makes you smile at the absurdity of it all, but a second later, it leaves you staring into the void, wondering what the true meaning of being here really is. He mastered the art of words and was a generous teacher, which is why he used to remind his students that their first job is to grab the reader’s attention and their second is to take care of it so they don’t leave. You have to give them an addictive story.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing your next short story, screenplay, novel, or newsletter — you’ve probably faced the same questions that haunt me in the morning: How do I connect this idea with the person on the other side? How do I make them stay?

Today, I want to break down with you the seven writing rules Kurt shared in the preface to his book Bagombo Snuff Box, and tell you how they’ve helped me shape the rhythm of everything I write.

Let’s take it step by step.

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1. Use people’s time in a way that makes them feel it was time well spent

Time is the scarcest and most valuable resource we have. Deep down, it is our life. Reading is one way of spending that time, perhaps one that is increasingly endangered in an age of endless short-form video content. For this reason, your reader should leave knowing they received something they didn’t have when they arrived.

Don’t think of anything too lofty. It could be something as simple as:

• A lesson
• An emotion
• A practical idea
• A new perspective

This applies to both fiction and nonfiction.

Think of movies like Interstellar, which gives you a profound reflection on time, love, and the future of humanity; or Homer’s Odyssey, which connects us with Greek mythology through an epic adventure filled with emotion; or even this article of mine, which aims to give you a practical insight for your writing.

Always write with this value proposition in mind.

If, when you finish your work, you can’t point to the benefit of reading it, revise the work.

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2. Give the reader at least one character to root for

It doesn’t matter whether your protagonist is your own audience trying to get through a gray day, a warrior in a distant world, or simply an inanimate object.

We all need someone to accompany us through the fog. Only when we get the reader emotionally invested will they be willing to hold that character’s hand through every stumble along the way. This is also a key principle that the artists at Pixar emphasize when making their successful films.

And yes, this is obvious in fiction, but it remains useful in nonfiction.

When I write an article, or when you examine the successes of the genre, one key to success is weaving it together with a story. We empathize because the author strips themselves bare and tells us about their process from the same mud we’re standing in today, or because they bring forward the experience of someone who has already climbed out of that mud. It’s simple: we don’t fall in love with data; we fall in love with people and stories.

• On the most intimate level: We see ourselves in the vulnerability and hope trapped within The Diary of a Young Girl.
• In personal development: We see ourselves in the mice from Who Moved My Cheese?, dealing with the fear of change.
• In psychology and survival: We see ourselves in Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, looking for purpose in the middle of chaos.

If there’s no “someone” to hold on to, it’s very hard for the reader to stay.

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3. Every character should want something, even if it’s only a glass of water

Desire is the heartbeat that keeps a story alive.

Think of The Big Lebowski: an entire movie revolving around a man who simply wants to get his rug back. Now, every time you review your paragraphs, ask yourself: What is this character really looking for? Answering that question gives the plot a clear direction at all times.

• In Finding Nemo: Everything boils down to a father who simply wants to find his son.
• In Gladiator: The driving force behind an entire empire is a man who only wants to avenge his family and return home.
• In The Lord of the Rings: Despite its epic scale, the plot is as simple as two friends who want to throw a ring into a volcano.

You can make things as intricate, profound, and expansive as you want, but at their core, things are quite simple. Have a clear premise and build around it.

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4. Every sentence should either reveal character or advance the action

This is one of the best editing principles there is. In short fiction, where Kurt was an expert, if a sentence doesn’t reveal something about a character or move the story forward… simply remove it.

Your reader will thank you.

And in nonfiction, the same rule applies: every sentence should move toward a new idea or develop the value of what you’re explaining. If a paragraph doesn’t deepen the subject or take you to the next step, it’s filler.

The masters of nonfiction get straight to the point and make every line count:

• In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Stephen Covey doesn’t waste time; each principle is broken down with clarity and pragmatism.
• In Atomic Habits: James Clear cuts out the fluff to give you a manual where every line is a precise instruction for using the method.

Conciseness and clarity don’t take away depth. Quite the opposite: in many works where the reader’s goal is to want to know more, they amplify it. Read with your scissors in hand and cut everything that doesn’t take the reader toward what they want to know.

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5. Start as close to the end as possible

This is crucial in short formats such as short stories and newsletter-style nonfiction.

Cut the unnecessary preambles and let your reader fall straight into the heart of the story. Starting in the middle of the action, what narrative calls in medias res, is exciting for you as the writer and transfers that same pull to the person reading.

It’s the key to succeeding in short formats like the short story, and it applies to nonfiction too.

Long introductions are obstacles in the path of a modern reader who lives in a hurry. Your opening should immediately make the value of staying clear. Don’t beat around the bush — present the problem, promise the solution, and get started.

Look at the introduction to this article as an example. In just three paragraphs, I told you:

• Kurt Vonnegut was a master at hooking readers.
• He taught his students to do the same.
• Are you struggling to connect people with your ideas and make them stay?
• Stay, because here are his seven expert rules to solve that problem.

If the topic interested you, you were hooked instantly.

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6. Be a sadist

No matter how sweet and innocent your characters are, make terrible things happen to them.

This is also the golden rule of Pixar movies: We fall in love with the characters’ struggle, not their easy success. It’s only in the storms that we get to see what they’re made of, and we love them because they reflect our own imperfections — we see people who, deep down, are just like you and me.

It’s what I was saying earlier about nonfiction: connect with stories of people who climbed out of the mud and explain how they did it so they can help you.

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7. Write to please just one person

There’s an unfounded idea that publishing on the internet means speaking to an auditorium full of people.

That’s not how it works.

If you try to make the entire world fall in love with your work, your voice will become diluted. Look at the content that goes viral: it tends to be superficial because it needs to appeal to the lowest common denominator to reach everyone. In that process, it loses all its charisma because it has to be capable of touching everyone — and every person is a universe when you go deep enough.

Instead, if you write with one specific person in mind — with their doubts, their fears, what they need to read today — something magical happens. The magic of platforms like Substack is that success isn’t measured in millions of empty clicks. The artist’s value lies in connecting with a small community of souls who resonate with your art, support your work, and take part in the process. The ongoing exchange of comments and events creates a bond between you and your readers, between all of us.

Think about your ideal reader, write only for them, and let the others find their way to you.

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Return to the basics when you feel lost

Which of these rules resonates most with your own mental space? I tend to come back here whenever I get stuck halfway through a draft. If these lines manage to accompany you in your own process or spark your curiosity to discover the work of this fascinating author, then the journey will have been worth it.

Thank you for being here with me for another day.

Take care.

— Álvaro

🌱 Instagram: Mental Garden

Want to know more? Here are 3 related ideas to explore:

1. The 10 Rules of Elmore Leonard for Mastering Writing
2. The 6 Psychological Rules That Determine What Goes Viral
3. The 4 Structures of Great Stories, According to Kurt Vonnegut (and Science)

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2609.16 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 4094 days ago & DAD = 748 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4229 - Gray Whales Dying

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4229 - Gray Whales Dying

This is a good share.

This problem is serious, one of many catastrophic issues in nature and climate.

Thanks for tuning in.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/gray-whales-washing-dead-west-110000043.html

Gray whales are washing up dead on the West Coast. The reason is alarming

Up and down the Pacific coast, dead gray whales are mysteriously washing ashore—and scientists think they know why

Ainslie Cruickshank

Wed, September 9, 2026 at 4:00 AM PDT

6 min read

The bodies kept appearing as if out of nowhere. In March a whale corpse was found floating in San Francisco Bay, seagulls perched on top like vultures at carrion. Then, in April, a whale was found dead and beached in Oregon, the arc of its carcass camouflaged against the surf. That same month, another whale, this one a juvenile, was found lifeless and lodged among woody debris in a Washington State river, miles from the ocean.

As of mid-August, 187 gray whales have been found dead this year along the West Coast, from Mexico to Alaska. Scientists have scrambled to investigate, hoping to prevent further deaths in a species that has been in decline for years—gray whales lost 35 percent of their population between 2020 and 2025.

There's been a "complete decline [and] a collapse of reproduction," says Steven Swartz, co-director and senior scientist at the Gray Whale Research in Mexico program. The whale corpses now washing up on the West Coast hold clues as to why: many of them were emaciated, so much so that one scientist described them as "a bag of bones."

It's an incredible and horrifying twist of fate for a whale that had until recently been a major conservation success story. Decimated by whaling in the 19th century, the eastern North Pacific gray whale population had bounced back from near extinction to roughly 20,000 animals by 1994, when the species was removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List. By 2016 the whales numbered some 27,000 individuals. But as of 2025, the population had plummeted to 13,000 or so, as whale after whale washed up on shores up and down the West Coast.

Scientists, meanwhile, have been racing to explain what is happening to the whales by studying the stranded corpses for signs and clues that could illuminate why they are dying in droves.

From Rebound to Population Plummet

Gray whales are baleen whales that have mottled skin, a dorsal hump, pointed pectoral fins and eyes set low above permanently frowning mouths. They can reach 49 feet long and weigh up to 90,000 pounds, as much as six large elephants. Each year they make one of the longest known mammal migrations on Earth, a roughly 10,000-mile round trip between Mexico and the Arctic. The whales are seasonal ecosystem engineers, stirring up nutrients on the seafloor as they feed.

The mysterious strandings began in earnest in mid-December 2018. And in 2019 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared an unusual mortality event, triggering an international investigation. Scientists rushed to study the stranded whales, searching for clues. They took the whales' measurements, inspected their bodies for signs of starvation or trauma, cut them open to examine their blubber and took samples from their organs. The analyses pointed to malnutrition as a common cause of death, followed by blunt force trauma consistent with being struck by boats.

In other words, the whales were either dying as a result of a lack of food or because boats had crashed into them.

The unusual mortality event officially ended in 2023 after strandings slowed—but the whales haven't stopped dying. Instead the decline has only become "more alarming," says John Calambokidis, senior research biologist and co-founder of the nonprofit Cascadia Research Collective. Though overall population numbers ticked up slightly this year, to an estimated 18,000, "the overall trend is still a decline," says Aimée Lang, a research scientist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

As scientists gather more evidence, it is becoming increasingly apparent that gray whales are starving to death. The reason why lies in the changing environment of the Arctic Ocean.

How Melting Sea Ice Is Starving Whales

Gray whales are mostly bottom-feeders, scooping up mouthfuls of sediment and invertebrates as they swim along the seafloor. They trap shrimplike amphipods and filter out the muck through baleen plates attached to their upper jaws⁠, leaving wallows and billows of mud—a nutrient feast for other organisms—in their wake. This buffet is intricately linked to the Arctic sea ice and the algae that grows beneath it.

When the algae die, they fall through the water column to the seafloor, where they feed the crustaceans that gray whales eat. But with Arctic temperatures skyrocketing, the sea ice is melting earlier and faster, disrupting the food web the whales rely on.

Amanda Montañez; Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (data)

That was the conclusion of a study published late last year in the ICES Journal of Marine Science that examined decades worth of data on the population sizes, births and deaths of gray whales and the biomass of Arctic crustaceans. It turns out that the health of the whales and the crustaceans ebbs and flows in near perfect synchrony, says study co-author Joshua Stewart, an assistant professor at Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute. And though gray whale populations have dipped periodically before, this time is different: "We're not seeing signs of the population quickly bouncing back like we did previously," Stewart says. Essentially, the ecosystem can no longer support as many gray whales as it once did. As a result, the whales are starving.

"The whales are just basically running out of energy as they try to migrate and dying," Swartz says. For years, he's seen more and more skinny gray whales returning to the San Ignacio Lagoon, one of their breeding areas off the Baja coast. He is also seeing far fewer calves being born. Lang, who helps count mothers and calves as they migrate north along the California coast, says that last year the team counted just 17 whale pairs. From that, they estimate 85 calves were born in 2025, well below the 1,600 or so born in 2014.

Sign of Hope

As dire as the situation is, there is still a chance that gray whales can survive this. For one, the animals could adapt to changing conditions in the Arctic by looking for food elsewhere, Lang says. They've "shown pretty amazing behavioral flexibility already," she adds.

Already there is evidence some gray whales are switching it up. A small group of gray whales called the Sounders detour from their northward migration to feed in Puget Sound, and then there is the Pacific Coast Feeding Group, which eschews the Arctic to feed between northern California and British Columbia.

There's other evidence to suggest more whales are joining those alternative routes. Gray whales have also been seen more frequently in San Francisco Bay since 2018, and scientists suspect they're searching for food there, too. But the heavy marine traffic in the Bay makes it a dangerous place for a whale: at least 18 percent of the whales that entered between 2018 and 2025 died there, according to a recent Frontiers in Marine Science study,many of which were killed by ships. A nascent system using AI and thermal cameras could help ships better spot the whales and reduce ship strikes, but it's still being tested.

These efforts also do little to address the core threat to gray whales. "The challenge with this case is that the lever we have to pull is slowing or reversing climate change," Stewart says. "It's something we know we need to do, but we haven't done it."

As the summer turns to fall and gray whales begin their return journey south, scientists will be watching closely to see how many make it back and what condition they're in when they get there.

"The big question in all our minds is just, where's the bottom?" Stewart says. "I hope they turn around soon."

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2609.15 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 4093 days ago & DAD = 747 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.