One of my favorite things to do in life is seek out the connection that exists between two or three seemingly unrelated ideas. Apartments and public education, for example, don't appear to have a lot in common, but as I've mentioned before (I am a teacher, after all) the gap between today's teacher and today's leasing consultant is not nearly as vast as many think.

As multi family insiders, the primary medium for progressive business lies in our ability to create engaging narratives. Whether through word of mouth, social media, billboards, print ads, direct mailers, or carrier pigeons, our ability to make our brand appealing through stories remains the cornerstone of our craft. It’s a worthwhile exercise, therefore, to learn a little bit about storytelling from one of the best to ever do it.

In my unit on Kurt Vonnegut, I couldn’t help notice striking resonances of the apartment industry through Vonnegut’s thoughts on writing.

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

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 hell 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.

Now for my annotations: the numbers below correspond to the list above…

1. This one’s pretty self-explanatory…
2. This is all about relevancy. What connection are you making to your “reader,” and why should they listen to you?
3. What does your “reader” want? Are you paying attention to their needs and accommodating them accordingly?
4. How are you and your “reader” engaging productively? What steps are you taking to eliminate the competition and secure the sale?
5. Love this one. Love it.
6. Gossip. We all do it. Let’s face it, it’s one of the ways we cope with the monotony of the office grind. And in the apartment world, gossip is rampant because there’s a built-in network of the wildest characters imaginable living outside your door, just waiting for their stories to be told.
7. This is my favorite. I’m interested in your thoughts about it. Your story will get pneumonia! Perfect.
8. As with the first one, I think this one speaks for itself…

As writers, my students read these as tools for better story-telling. But I think Vonnegut’s ideas hold just as much truth for the stories of the apartment industry as they do for the tales of Billy Pilgrim and Harrison Bergeron.

Happy writing.