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“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of."
Kurt Vonnegut
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Kilgore Slept Here
“Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Who is the target audience?
Goods such as clothes, cars, shoes, houses, everything sold is manufactured and sold to a targeted audience. One certainly doesn't sell baby products to a sixty year old bachelor. Not unless he is pretty kinky but besides that, not the target audience. Hot Rod Magazines, Gun & Ammo Mag isn't usually something Sweet Young Things purchase.
There are different genre stories for different targeted readers. Different publishers seek only a specific style of writing (genre) to capture a specific reader age and taste in stories. When the next True Romance comes off the press they know they have 1.6 million readers who will purchase it as soon as it hits the stores. Those readers are NOT going to be Mr. Macho with the beard, gets out of the pickup when he arrives, scratches his nuts, spits on the ground, and shouts, "who brought the beer".
There is nothing wrong with being sadistic, nor bondage, raging sex, or blood thirsty when writing a story. Keep in mind one's readers are going to be a specific group of people just as the Gun and Ammo mags, True Romance seek a specific readership.
Now you know what we as publishers had to figure out and try to understand whatever story we were publishing, would best be placed in what stores and locations. Most readers in Texas are not into what goes like hot cakes on the east or west coast. It's a cutthroat business and a lot of publishers go belly up while trying to figure out what they did wrong. Toss in trying to keep up with an aging readership while "trying" to gain new readers and it becomes as much a crap shoot as it does intelligent marketing science.
Punishment, blood and guts is only going to appeal to a targeted audience. I never read Kurt Vonnegut so I don't know what readership he was seeking. I can guarantee you it wasn't a general audience reader. Write what pleases ones self. For 99.99 percent of us, we are never going to be the next Steven King. I for one wouldn't want to as long as I bring a little time away from day to day problems and give a little pleasure to a reader or two. For a person who failed virtually every single English class she took, I'm not aiming too high.
Hugs hon, write for the pleasure of it and if you get rich writing, I want your autographed picture.
always,
Barb
Chase the dreams, don't lose focus of surviving in the here and now.
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
Vonnegut was hardly bloodthirsty
or uneccesarily sadistic to his characters. Maybe he felt like he was because of his goodhearted nature. He wrote about average people in absurdly surreal situations, how they cope (or don't) with the sheer capriciousness of fate under the cold indifference of heaven. The bad situations (Cat's Cradle, Player Piano) often arose due to the short-sighted blundering of those in positions of power. A short story that still haunts me was about a scientist who had been invited to the home of a General. The General had a mentally disabled son that he clearly cared for, who was playing in the living room. They adjourned to his study, where he tried to coax the scientist into joining a team that would weaponize some breakthrough in physics he'd made. They argued back and forth about ethics and doing one's duty etc and eventually the scientist left without being convinced to help, letting himself out. When the General walked out into the front room he saw his son had a .45 that the scientist must have given him on his way out. He took it away and checked, discovering it was loaded, and in the story's final line roared: "WHO THE HELL WOULD GIVE A LOADED GUN TO AN IDIOT???"
I think Mark Twain would be proud of that one. A lot of people don't like Vonnegut's unfashionable pacifism these days, but after living through the firebombing of Dresden as a POW captured by the Germans (Slaughterhouse Five would be a very good introduction to his works) I think he's entitled to his opinions.
~hugs, Veronica
What borders on stupidity?
Canada and Mexico.
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The Weapon
A story by a favourite writer of mine, Fredric Brown, who was the absolute master not just of the short-short but the short-short-and-really-NASTY.