By David Fortier

  What I learned from Wakefield about Vonnegut. 

1. Many of his early attempts were rejected.
2. When they were rejected, as was the tenor of the day, he received valuable feedback from editors who were took an interest in his submissions, and when he received this feedback, he followed an editor’s advice.
3. Vonnegut followed up on leads, including networking, with old college classmates.
4. Vonnegut, at one point, sought the services of one of those manuscript doctoring outfits, but did not have the money to contract with one.
5. Having followed up with old classmates and having received a detailed critique of his submission, Vonnegut would apply the appropriate fixes and resubmit; to which he often received a second critique which he set to work on.
6. He worked on his fiction weeknights and weekends.
7. Even when he followed up on fix after fix and the piece was ready finally submitted to the publisher, there was no guarantee that the piece would be published. This did not stop Vonnegut from continuing to work on a piece and resubmitting it elsewhere. In not a few instances, a story that he started on one year might be published three years later.
8. He was not above working on salable stories. In fact, when his stories started getting picked up regularly, he made a deal with himself that as he made more money writing stories than at his day job, he would leave his day job. Which he did. Which worked, until it didn’t, as the venues dried up with the advent of TV.
9. When the time came, his editor friends handed him off to an agent, who pushed Vonnegut harder to write salable stories.
10. Vonnegut had a supporting cast, from his first wife to his dad. The latter pasted the letter in which Vonnegut shares his vision—of leaving his day job—on Masonite and covered them over with varnish to memorialize them.
11. When the short story market dried up, and before he hit it big with Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut once borrowed $300 dollars from his son, who made the money on his paper route.
12. Vonnegut was appreciative of all the help he received, especially from his editors. In a letter about the role of creative writing courses, he says in so many words, creative writing instructors have always been with us, in the form of those editors.

Part 3

Part 1