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What he means is avoid lengthy preamble and explanation for a story setup, but really it is hard to understand "start as close to the end as possible" without understanding story structure in general. It is a vague dictum.
In a typical popular and commercially successful story, a character is introduced, and within 10% or 15% of the story, something happens (called an "inciting incident") that is what the whole story is going to be "about".
We see the character in their normal world, solving normal-world problems (for them, if they are a hit-man or detective or wizard their normal world can be extreme for the rest of us).
We devote a little time (like I said, 10%) to show our MC (main character or main crew of characters) and build their normal world and something in their personality, readers expect that. It is necessary, and not possible to skip, because when something important happens we want the reader to sympathize with the MC.
Many beginning writers fail at this and try to start with an MC in extreme peril, but readers don't care if they don't know who is who.
What Vonnegut means is, whatever the main peril or problem or goal of the MC is, introduce it (as the inciting incident) earlier rather than later. But you cannot ignore the essentials, of letting the reader see your MC in action and understand the world she lives in.
To accomplish that, I recommend giving her some regular, everyday kind of problem to begin with, and have her interact with other people as quickly as possible. That is how readers learn "who she is" and is your opportunity to show something about her, a skill, a weakness, humor, whatever helps define her. THEN, as Stephen King says, you can put her in the blender.
Typically (and not every story goes this way) the big problem of the book will end up being something that tears her away from her normal world, where she is comfortable, and force her into a new world where she is uncertain and struggling. But for us readers to understand that, we first have to know what was her normal world, where she was competent and certain.
If you think about a romance, it works this way: A woman is shown in her normal (single) world, the inciting incident is meeting a future love interest that proves difficult, but they have to work together, so there is conflict that tears our MC away from her normal world, but then in stages understanding and love is found and she enters a new normal world, no longer single.
In fact most stories work that way, it is just that the goals of what is being sought are changed.
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