“Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you. Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion. Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.” ― Rumi
In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond - and his response is magnificent: “Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:
I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
God bless you all!
Kurt Vonnegut
Nimbus Publishing and Vagrant Press Goose Lane Editions Breakwater Books Ltd. The Acorn Press Bouton d'or Acadie Canada Council for the Arts | Conseil des arts du Canada
When I was 15 I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.
It seems a lot of people have found my little story (as well as the incredible Vonnegut’s advice) helpful, so I thought I’d add a little. Because the thing is, at the TIME, when I was 15, I thought Mr. Archeologist was wrong. I thought he was just being nice. I was sure that actually, the point was still to find that One Thing you are Naturally Talented at and do it. Even if I went on to do musicals and stuff just because I enjoyed it and let go of felling bad about it. I quit writing at 23 because I was shitty at it. (Hint, I’m 41 and back at it, much improved.)
I taught myself to sew about ten years ago and within a year was making elaborate costumes to wear to cons. People always told me how “talented” I was at sewing. And I always said I was not born knowing how to operate a sewing machine. I couldn’t sew a straight line of stitches for MONTHS. (I’m still not super good at that!) But I enjoyed it, so I kept at it until I could make the things I wanted to make.
Life is about finding the things you ENJOY, not the things you’re good at. If you enjoy something, you will GET better at it, because you will keep doing it. But as Mr. Vonnegut makes clear so eloquently, being good at something isn’t necessary for it to feed your soul.
So, I was aware that this post had been misattributed and was making rounds on facebook and twitter, but now The Chive has picked it up and attributed my words to Kurt Vonnegut.
And look, making ad revenue from other people’s content is what they do, but the very least they could do is get the source right or post an accurate screenshot.
Mr. Vonnegut, whose work I have adored for years, is no longer alive to correct this mistake and I feel more than a little guilty that people think he would write something so boring and unwitty as my little story. (Which yes, is true, happened to me, and so it’s very odd to read people react as if a Great Man wrote this.) (Also how much more people value a thing if a Famous Man wrote something than an anonymous woman on the internet.)
So I have contacted The Chive to inform them of this, but I don’t know if they will acknowledge it at all. In the meantime, please share this correct source, and if you see it making the rounds, correct the attribution.
Also I have a Ko-fi link on my homepage if anyone has maybe enjoyed this or shared the incorrect version without being aware. I’m unemployed and disabled and currently have no income coming in, so, yanno.
I hear it all the time. ‘All you have to do to be a writer, is write.’
Well… yeah. But there’s a difference between a person who writes and being a writer, isn’t there? You can be both, and you can hop from one to the other, but to mistake the two is surely a disservice to writers who deal with the constant self-doubt and endless bouts of drafting.
