“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.”
Why don’t we read books anymore? Is it because our span of attention is getting thinner and thinner? Is it because there are no more good writers in the world or did we get bored of the good ones that passed? Maybe, but it’s just an hypothesis based on no scientific data, we got scared of books. Books are scary objects for a person whose brain is constantly entertained by a variety of inputs articulated in a variety of different media. And what is a book? Well, apparently, it is just paper. A lot of paper. With a lot of micro-inputs that come in the same old, boring, succession. But isn’t it the same with music? Or movies? We tend to evaluate piles of books differently than how we think of, say, a playlist, or a list of movies. As if it was a whole corpus in which every book is the same. Instead, it isn’t. Some books are friends, some books are boring friends, some other books are like the people we tend to avoid when at a party: a black-hole ingesting all of our potential fun. So. Why are we showing you this video of writer Kurt Vonnegut explaining the structure of a story with a simple cartesian plane? Well, because by listening to the way he tells a story about a story you could understand that there are storytellers and storytellers, and the ones who are capable of taking the boring data we all already know and a chalkboard into a universe of meta-significance and deep humor are surely worth reading. Vonnegut god bored of the usual structures of the stories, his own story being continuously undulating between the good and bad events, and started building up stories where there’s no necessarily good or evil, but just a trembling line that unites all human-kind in a tragicomic experience where the beginning and the end are curiously similar.