Kurt Vonnegut on Writing

Kurt Vonnegut on Writing

Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s summation of his career as a magazine writer reminded me of Nicole’s worrying about being “a professional writer.” It also reminded me of Pennebaker’s theory that writing heals by externalizing experience. It also made me feel good about perhaps following my present career path, encouraging writers. It echoes the lesson I learned as a photographer too. Art and life are inseparable. Art and money have nothing to do with each other. Every time I hear anyone talking about writing, or producing art for a “market” I break out in hives.

There was a time, in the 50s and 60s when magazines like Life and others provided a place where writers and artists could stretch out without fewer worries about demographics. They were run by people with more taste than marketing savy. But the golden age of print is gone, and the new age has not provided any alternative. Vonnegut said everything I wanted to say, at the time I read that blog entry, only better.

Thanks to popular magazines, I learned on the job to be a fiction writer. Such paid literary apprenticeships, with standards of performance so low, don’t exist anymore. Mine was an opportunity to get to know myself. Those who wrote for self-consciously literary publications had this advantage, their talent and sophistication aside: They already knew what they could do and who they were.

There may be more Americans than ever now embarking on voyages of self-discovery like mine, by writing stories, come hell or high water, as well as they can. I lecture at eight colleges and universities each year, and have been doing so for two decades. Half of those one hundred sixty institutions have a writer-in-residence and a course in creative writing. When I quit General Electric to become a writer, there were only two such courses, one at the University of Iowa, the other at Stanford, which my President’s daughter now attends.

Given that it is no longer possible to make a living writing short stories, and that the odds against a novel’s being successful are a thousand to one, creative-writing courses could be perceived as frauds, as would pharmacy courses if there were no drugstores. Be that as it may, students themselves demanded creative writing courses while they were demanding so many other things, passionately and chaotically, during the Vietnam War.

What students wanted and got, and what so many of their children are getting, was a cheap way to externalize what was inside them, to see in black and-white who they were and what they might become. I italicize cheap because it takes a ton of money to make a movie or a TV show. Never mind that you have to deal with the scum of the earth if you try to make one.

There are on many campuses, moreover, local papers, weeklies or monthlies, that publish short stories but cannot pay for them. What the heck, practicing an art isn’t a way to earn money. It’s a way to make one’s soul grow.

Bon voyage.

Some people are lucky, like Kurt Vonnegut. Most of the time, I think they deserve it. Some people, like me, are not. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel like my soul is growing, sailing off someplace— I don’t know where. That’s been enough so far. I hope I can continue to convince myself that that it will always be enough.