I met once with a friend of a friend who was writing a book and wanted to talk about getting it published. I make it a policy not to give publishing advice, mainly because I don’t have any reliable advice to give. But for some reason I met with this writer. Perhaps I had not yet established my not-talking-about-publishing policy. Perhaps this meeting was the very reason I established the policy.

This writer was getting close to the end of her manuscript, she said, and getting it published was the most important thing in the world.

The most important thing? I asked. In the world?

Yes, she said. She had poured her all into this book, and she would be crushed if it never got published.

I asked her what she thought publication was going to do for her.

I don’t remember the exact details of her answer, but you can probably guess. Most of who have ever hoped to be published have felt the same things: getting published will reassure us that we’re good writers, that we have something to say, that we haven’t been wasting our time. Getting published will prove the doubters wrong. Getting published will feel like an invitation into a club that includes many of our heroes, dead and alive. It will feel like being loved by people we don’t even have to love back.

As I said, I don’t remember exactly what this friend of a friend said she thought publication was going to do for her. But whatever it was, I told her that publication wasn’t going to do it. If you feel insignificant, publication isn’t going to give you significance. If you are riddled with self-doubt, a published book just gives you wider scope for doubting yourself. When you sell a few books, you immediately start comparing yourself to the people who sell more. If you sell a ton of books, Imposter Syndrome is just around the corner, seeking whom to devour (namely you).

I was eloquent, I don’t mind telling you. And when I was finished, my writer-friend of a friend told me that she heard what I was saying, and thanks for the input, but in her case it was different. Getting published actually was going to solve her problems. I went away sad.

To be clear, I’m not saying that things like affirmation, belonging, self-assurance, and love can’t be had. I’m just saying that if you aren’t getting those elsewhere, you won’t get them when you get published. Publication doesn’t turn you into a different person. It exaggerates what you already are.

I got to thinking about all this when I read a letter that Kurt Vonnegut wrote to a group of high-school students who had written to him for advice as part of an English-class assignment:

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

Vonnegut would die the next year. After a long lifetime of doing the work, this is where the old soldier arrived: Make art, 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.” 

As I said above, getting published isn’t going to change you into a different person. But writing, like all creative work, can change you into a different person.

A few weeks ago I got an excellent question from a Habit Weekly reader named Todd Thurston. His question came in response to my discussion of subordinating conjunctions during a three-week series on clauses. I had been talking about the fact that subordinating conjunctions (like when or because) are one way of joining one clause to another:

• When the squirrel raids my bird feeder, I am sad.
• I am sad because the squirrel raids my bird feeder. 

Those subordinating conjunctions when and because turn the independent clause “The squirrel raids my bird feeder” into a dependent clause that can’t stand alone as a sentence. These are now sentence fragments:

• When the squirrel raids my bird feeder.
• Because the squirrel raids my bird feeder.

In response, Todd wrote:

If someone asked me the question – “why are you so sad?”  Could my answer not be “Because the squirrel raids my bird feeder”? Or if a questioner says “At what point do you find you are most sad?”  might I say “When the squirrel raids my bird feeder”?   If those are proper answers then are they standing alone as a sentence? or are they incorrect altogether?

I love this question–or, rather questions. I’ll take them one at a time:

• If those are proper answers, then are they standing alone as a sentence?

These dependent clauses (“Because the squirrels…” and “When the squirrels…”) are indeed proper answers. But no, they still aren’t sentences.

• or are they incorrect altogether?

While it is true that our dependent clauses aren’t complete sentences, that doesn’t mean they are incorrect altogether. Otherwise, native speakers of English would be altogether incorrect most of the time. It is perfectly normal and acceptable to answer questions with sentence fragments, whatever you were told in elementary school. It is so normal, in fact, that I would be suspicious of a person who always answered questions in complete sentences.

Terence: Why are you so sad?
Wendy: I am sad because my bird feeder is empty.
Terence: At what point do you find you are most sad?
Wendy: I find I am most sad when the squirrel raids my bird feeder.

I wouldn’t blame Terence if he began at this point to suspect that Wendy is a cyborg or possibly a foreign spy–somebody who did not learn English by having healthy relationships with native speakers of English.

I read a story once about a Russian spy who got caught when the interrogators asked him to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” in its entirety. He thought he was doing a great job because he made it through the third verse without getting any words wrong. But, of course, that was how they got him: what American knows three verses of “The Star Spangled Banner”? There is such a thing as being too correct. It’s helpful to know that a subordinating conjunction turns an independent clause into a sentence fragment. But when it comes down to a choice between being technically correct and sounding like a robot-spy, I know which one I’m going to choose.

All this reminds me of a Facebook conversation I participated in a while back. My friend Abe Goolsby (who illustrated The Bark of the Bog Owl and The Charlatan’s Boy) asked the following question about subject-verb agreement:

Please help me get straight once and for all on the following:

1. Lynrd Skynrd have/has agreed to perform at my nephew’s bar mitzvah.
2.  A gang of notorious outlaws decide/decides to improve their/its standing in the community by providing security for the annual Sunshine and Daisy Glitter Club Bake Sale.

This is a question about collective nouns, and one’s treatment of collective nouns depends on what country one lives in. In the United States, we treat collective nouns as singular, so we would say “Lynyrd Skynyrd has agreed…” and “A gang of notorious outlaws decides to improve its standing…” In the United Kingdom, where people also speak English (or, in any case, a variety of English), collective nouns are treated as plural: “Lynyrd Skynyrd have agreed…” and “A gang of notorious outlaws decide to improve their standing…”

I’m not sure how Canadians handle collective nouns. I know they indulge in a few British misspellings, including neighbour, humour, and centre, but I don’t know whose side they’re on with respect to collective nouns. Canadians readers, enlighten me.

But the real reason I brought up this somewhat arcane point of grammar is to put this and all grammar questions into a larger context. I always tell my writing students that the best thing is to stay out of situations in which your reader will even think about your grammar. In American usage, “a gang of notorious outlaws decides” is technically right, but your reader will most certainly pause to think about whether you’re right. And that pause is itself a problem. So I’d probably go with something like “A notorious outlaw gang decides…” or “The notorious outlaws decide…”

All things being equal, correct grammar is better than incorrect grammar. But the best grammar is invisible grammar–the kind your reader doesn’t have to think about one way or another.

Why do you want to be original? That may sound like a rhetorical question, but it might do you some good to answer it.

We appreciate and admire originality when we see it in other writers. One reason to be original, then, is to be appreciated and admired. But that’s not an especially good or sustainable reason. You’ll never know whether you’ve been original enough…or, for that matter, whether you’ve been appreciated and admired enough.

A less self-centric, more reader-centric approach will be helpful here. Why do you as a reader appreciate original writing when you see it? I think it’s because you feel that the writer has given you something that you couldn’t or wouldn’t have gotten for yourself.

When you’re the one trying to be original, originality feels like a moving target. Most of us don’t feel very original most of the time. And sometimes when we do feel that we’re being original, we aren’t as original as we think. But the reader’s experience doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the writer’s feelings. You’re  better off not thinking about your own originality one way or another. Think instead about how you can give your reader something she can’t get for herself.

Perhaps you think that giving the reader something she can’t get for herself is just as daunting a task as being original. I don’t think it is. You know a lot of things your reader doesn’t know (what your grandmother’s house smelled like, for instance, or where your junior high math teacher snuck off to smoke cigarettes, or how the owls in your yard call to one another after dark). You have taken the time to think through things your reader hasn’t thought through. You are interested in things that your reader doesn’t yet know to be interesting. 

The particular combination of things you know and understand is unique. Nobody has seen exactly what you have seen. And even if they had, they wouldn’t have your particular perspective on those things. Flannery O’Connor put it this way: “What one sees is given by circumstances and by the nature of one’s particular kind of perception.” If you can just give an account of what you have actually seen in the world, originality will take care of itself.

We tend to think of originality as something that happens between a writer’s ears, as if truly original writers have minds that can do things that most of our minds can’t. It’s true enough that different people have different gifts. But leaving aside the originality between your ears, your experience is original. If you give an account of what you have seen with your own eyes, if you tell the truth the best you can–if you resist the temptation to package up your experience according to familiar formulae, to tell what you wish you had seen or what you thought you should have seen (or what you think a more original writer would have seen), you have an excellent chance of giving the reader something she couldn’t have gotten for herself.