*YA author of If I Stay and Where She Went (beautiful novels) offers one DO and one DON’T  for aspiring writers. Originally posted here on her Tumblr!

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So I just got back from a whole bunch of traveling and touring and got asked a zillion questions, but one of the most popular ones was this: What advice do you have for aspiring writers? I answered it so many times that I managed to edit down my usual blathering to a single Do and a single Don’t. Which I shall now pass on to you. And, not just that, but give you some actionable thing to do with these tips. Wait, did I just say actionable? There’s another tip for you: Never say actionable. It sounds so corporate.

Tip 1. DO OWN YOUR VOICE

So, once upon a time, back when I was a journalist, I had these aspirations to write for The New Yorker because I thought that’s where good journalism lived,  even  though when I was working atSeventeen I had one of the best journalism jobs ever—and, oh, you eyebrow raisers, I invite you to peruse my website for the articles I wrote about Afghan refugees seeking an education or the battle over gun control played out through teens. And maybe I might’ve eventually placed a piece or two in The New Yorker but it would’ve been tough for a variety of reasons, one of the primary ones is that the voice that comes naturally to me is that of a chatty 17-year-old. Oh, sure, I can fake that erudite droll New Yorker voice (“On a drizzly May afternoon, Professor HotStuff sat in his wood-paneled office, a copy of a Russian-translated Iliad in one hand, the latest issue of BOOBS in the other….”) but it’s not really my voice. When I finally “surrendered” to my teen voice, writing my first YA novel, Sisters in Sanity, it was like a lightbulb, a Homer Simpson D’Oh moment, and the feeling of slipping into a hot bath on a cold night. It was just so right. I had owned my voice at last. And things have gone pretty well since.

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* This is from the preface to Vonnegut’s short story collection, Bagombo Snuff Box

Creative Writing 101 for Short Stories

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.