Kurt Vonnegut

A long time ago, when I was hardly a writer, I was taken to a talk given to a Science faculty by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut shambled onto a stage where an old-fashioned blackboard had been placed. He picked up the chalk and proceeded to draw. He drew waves and wiggly lines and arrows dipping in and out of the waves. He was drawing for us the creative process and his own imagination. I don't know what that scientific audience made of it, but it was the moment which crystallized for me what writing was all about: about making connections, and finding forms to show those connections, and, in the service of that, daring to be brave and eccentric and not to give a hoot for the expected conventions.

A great writer has gone. Everyone else has said it, so I may as well: So it goes.