What motivates the characters or the author? What are they seeking? What is their purpose? Here’s how Kurt Vonnegut described the importance of incentives in books: “When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”

INTERVIEWER What happened when you reached the front? VONNEGUT I imitated various war movies I’d seen.

The Franklin Library is bringing out a deluxe edition of Slaughterhouse Five, I believe. VONNEGUT Yes. I was required to write a new introduction for it. INTERVIEWER Did you have any new thoughts? VONNEGUT I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defense or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited—not two or five or ten. Just one. INTERVIEWER And who was that? VONNEGUT Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that.

I adopted my sister’s sons after she died, and it’s spooky to watch them try to make her impossible dreams come true. INTERVIEWER What were your sister’s dreams like? VONNEGUT She wanted to live like a member of The Swiss Family Robinson, with impossibly friendly animals in impossibly congenial isolation. Her oldest son, Jim, has been a goat farmer on a mountaintop in Jamaica for the past eight years. No telephone. No electricity.