"Make a Face in Your Mashed Potatoes"

Kurt Vonnegut gave this advice to a group of high school students on how to live their best lives:

The Quote

"Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or how badly, not to get any fame and money, 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 [your teacher], and give it to her.

Dance home after school, and sing in the shower, on and on.

Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you're Count Dracula.

Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope [your teacher] 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.

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."

Analysis

Abigail spots Gloria in the Magic Garden

Vonnegut is telling us to create art not for praise or money but for self-discovery and a deeper understanding of our own "becoming."

His assignment for the students to write a poem, keep it private, and then destroy it highlights that the act of creating is more important than any recognition or lasting record of the work. In the end, it’s the process of self-discovery and expression that truly matters—not the outcome or others’ opinions. This is, in a nutshell, the pursuit of the Blue Flower.