writers on writing: "Practice any art" (Dedicated to @Denlillipaan)

Kurt Vonnegut shared this life advice with a class of high school students.¹ it is probably worthwhile for everyone to read it at some point in their lives.

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.

there is something we might be missing by publishing original content to SN (or online more broadly), something i have to reconcile with very much in this territory--perhaps @denlillaapan can relate--which is that everything we write, draw, compose or create ultimately to be shared on the web feels like quite the opposite of what Vonnegut is here prescribing, i.e.: write something good, "Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals."

write for the self-transformation, the experience of "becoming," to make your soul grow.

one thing that inspires me about Den is how he writes and writes and writes with complete abandon. what this has shown me is how screaming into the void can be therapeutic and a little more similar to Vonnegut's advice than we would sometimes like. and if he happens to be reading this, then i hope what he takes with him is that it is this writer's hope that, notwithstanding his SN hiatus, he does not put down his pencil.

it is very tempting to ascribe value to something based on how well or poorly it got zapped, whether it 'wins' this or that contest or puts food on your table, gets mentioned in that zine or on that podcast.

don't. is what Vonnegut would say.

https://stacker.news/items/1060953

Footnotes

1. Kurt Vonnegut's Letter to Students, 2006 ↩