Austin Kleon

It was my pleasure to give the inaugural talk at the first Creative Mornings here in Austin last month. The monthly theme was “The Future,” so I tried to make the talk a sort of rallying cry to encourage future presenters and attendees to open up and share the process of their creative work, not just the products of that process. (That happens to also be the subject of my next book.)

If you don’t want to watch the video, I’ve pasted my notes and a few slides from the talk below. Enjoy.

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It’s weird to try to give a talk about the future, because most of the time, talks like this are actually about THE PAST. A speaker is asked to get up on stage and talk because they’re someone who’s accomplished something, so they must have something to say, some sort of wisdom or experience or advice to impart to the audience.

But I happen to think that most advice is autobiographical — a lot of the time when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.

Now, we usually think that the past is behind us, and the future is in front of us. This seems totally natural, right? But years ago I read about this tribe of indigenous people in South America called the Aymara, and they have this very different way of talking about the past and the future.

When they talk about the past, they point to the space in front of them. When they talk about the future, they point behind them. Strange, right?

Well, the reason they point ahead of them when talking about the past is because the past is known to them — the past has happened, therefore it’s in front of them, where they can see it.

The future, on the other hand, is unknown, it hasn’t happened yet, so it’s behind them, where they can’t see it.

This kind of blew my mind when I read about it. The past is right in front of us, but the future is behind us.

The future is hard to talk about because it hasn’t happened yet — it’s behind us, where we can’t see it.

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Last week I hung my very first solo gallery show up at UNT on the Square in Denton, Texas.

All the pieces for the show were done in the five months after my son Owen was born—I made probably 60 or 70 poems, threw out at least half, and kept 30.

Most of the time I post poems to the blog or Instagram right after I make them. This is how I’ve always worked, and the whole reason the project exists—if it weren’t for online feedback and response, I would’ve stopped making these things a long time ago.

But for this show, I thought I’d experiment and work the way I imagine most artists working, toiling in the solitude and secrecy of my office, keeping the work to myself, editing at the very end, and doing the “big reveal” of the work at the show. (My wife, who reads all my stuff before anybody else, didn’t see most of the poems until a week or two before the show.) I was hoping maybe this way of working would teach me something.

What it taught me is that I hate working this way! I completely take for granted what working in the open online does for me — the feedback, the sense of connection, the sense that I’m moving towards something, etc.

Since NewspaperBlackout.com has been such a big part of the project, it was important to me that in addition to my own work this show have a section where people can make their own poems. The gallery has these cool moveable walls that we could play with, so we made the middle and focus point of the show this space with tables piled with newspaper, Sharpies, and binder clips that visitors can use to hang their own poems. Much to my delight, visitors who attended the opening were already taking advantage—it’ll be great to see how those walls fill up over the next couple of weeks.

I also wanted the space to feel really inviting, so we made a sign encouraging people to take photos of their favorite pieces and post them online with the #NewspaperBlackout hashtag:

The third and final section section of the show was a sort of last-minute idea we had — originally, I was going to project a slideshow of images from NewspaperBlackout.com, but I decided instead to project timelapse videos of me working on the show. (Again, the idea was to be inviting, to let visitors in on the process—I wanted the show to make you want to try out the method on your own.)

Here’s a timelapse video of us hanging the show:

Here’s a short video walkthrough of the opening:

And some more photos (see more on Flickr):

This was way, way more fun than I even though it would be, and I’m already thinking about what I’d do if I get the chance to do another show. Thanks so very much to everyone who came to the opening, and many, many thanks to Nicole Newland, Herbert Holl, and Meredith Buie for making it all happen. The show runs until May 6th if you’re up that way.

1. Shut up and write the book.

I’m an extreme extrovert, which is really great after I write a book and I have to go out into the world and talk to people about it, but not so great when I need to sequester myself long enough to actually get some real writing done. I do most of my thinking “out loud,” which means ideas don’t really come to me until I’ve expressed them — if I express them through speech, I’m less likely to turn around and go express them in writing…

2. Use the bathroom.

I get a lot of good ideas getting ready in the morning — if I have an idea in the shower, I write it down on my Aqua Notes pad, and if I have an idea after I step out of the shower, I’ll use a dry-erase marker to write it on the bathroom mirror.

3. Fix that mise en place.

Mise en place is a French cooking term that means “everything in place.” It’s used to refer to the way chefs will have all of their ingredients organized and ready to go before they start cooking. For writers, I think it’s equally important to have your workspace organized and ready to go, nothing in your way.

I made a slight adjustment to my desk recently that made a world of difference — I raised my external monitor up slightly, so I could set my laptop in front of it, then I got rid of my external keyboard. Now, when I sit down, I can just open up my laptop and get to work — if I need the extra monitor for research or design work, I can plug it in, but most of the time I don’t even use it.

4. Less notification, more meditation.

5. Stop researching.

I’ll let Steven Johnson take this one:

Email and social media and games are obvious distractions. In my experience, the more subtle threat — particularly for non-fiction writers — comes via the eminently reasonable belief that you’re not ready to start writing, because you haven’t finished your research yet.

David McCullough agrees:

There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.

Okay! Back to writing.

If you liked this post, you might like my book, Steal Like An Artist. 

This week my publisher sent me author copies of the Czech, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, and Turkish editions of Steal Like An Artist. (For some reason, the Spanish publisher hasn’t sent us copies yet.)

You can find out more about all the translations available here.

It’s very strange to have versions of your book that you can’t actually read.

Translation is always a creative challenge, but probably more so for Steal, which is a book not just full of writing, but pictures of writing.

I never made a font of my handwriting (all the headers in the book are a scan of my actual writing), so the foreign designers had to start from scratch.

Some of the publishers had an illustrator swap out words in the blackout poems so it would make sense:

The Dutch publisher, Lannoo, actually went to the trouble of finding different signs for the de-sign pages:

I’m not sure whether the Japanese publisher’s choice to switch the red accent color to a lime green was a purely aesthetic choice or if red has some meaning in Japan that I’m unfamiliar with. Their edition has a cool dust jacket with nothing but the arrowhead man on the cover of the actual book:

We’ve sold the rights in several other languages, but I should note that I have next-to-nothing to do with the foreign editions, so I don’t really know in advance when they’re going to drop. I’ll announce new editions on Twitter when they do: @austinkleon

I’ve been working on a new book since last July. Back in October I wrote, “I’ve been told that becoming a parent lights a fire under your ass like nothing else, so we’ll see what happens.” Ha.

I made a promise to Owen before he was born that I would not use him as an excuse to fail at The Thing I needed to do.

Oh sure, I would use him as an excuse for plenty of other things I didn’t want to do, like answer emails or attend various social functions, but I would not use him as an excuse to give up on The Thing.

Writers are constantly looking for excuses not to write, but there’s nothing more pathetic than a man who blames his family for not being able to write.

This is not to say that I wasn’t worried about becoming that pathetic father. Oh, I worried.

Right after Owen was born and we were still in the hospital, this woman got on Twitter and sent me half a dozen tweets about how she just knew Steal was written by somebody without kids, and just you wait, mister. She then proceeded to quote passages from the book, followed by little ejaculations like, “Ha! Try that when you’re up at 3 a.m. with a crying baby!”

Now, I have been on the internet a long time. I get a lot of emails from people who are, as far as I can tell, sad, awful, or completely insane. I have a pretty good firewall that filters what I let get to me.

This woman got to me.

It is one thing to have The Asshole in your brain, it is another thing to have a stranger hold a megaphone up to it and let it shout.

That woman’s tweets haunted me for that first month of survival mode, where it’s a great day if you get a shower, a hot meal, and a few hours of sleep. Maybe this really is it, I thought. Maybe it really is all over.

Now I’m on the other side of it all, and it hasn’t been easy getting back into the swing of The Thing — in fact, it’s been way harder than I expected. But I’d like to tell all would-be parents (and especially dads!) out there:

Don’t listen to these parents. They are using the precedent of their failures to predict your own. 

For every tired, overworked, bitter parent who tells you how much you won’t get done when you have kids, there’s a parent like John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, who talks about cradling his son in one arm, and picking out melodies on the piano with the other. Or George Saunders, who stole time from his office job for seven years to write the stories that would become CivilWarLand In Bad Decline. Or any number of moms and dads who make it work and make the work. They are out there. Find them. Hang out with them. Ask them how they do it. Let them be your role models.

Jung said, “Nothing has a stronger influence…on their children than the unlived life of the parents.”

You owe your kid food, safety, and love, but you also owe him your example. You give up on The Thing, and then when the kid grows up, he might give up on His Thing, too.

So don’t give up on The Thing.

Because life isn’t complicated enough, I always have 3 notebooks going at the same time:

1. My logbook stays on my nightstand.
2. My sketchbook stays in my office or goes in my bag if I’m traveling.
3. My pocket notebook goes with me everywhere.

I love the classic Moleskine and Field Notes sized notebooks, but they’re still a bit big. To be able to carry it everywhere, I need something that will really fit in my pocket — the notebooks I use are no bigger than my iPhone 4. (Because I know people will ask: I carry this type of Moleskine and usually a Pilot G2 or a PaperMate Flair pen.)

These notebooks are workhorses—they aren’t about pretty drawings or good penmanship, they’re about capturing ideas and the general debris of everyday life. It’s funny, but because I don’t treat them preciously, they’re often a more honest documentation of my scattered, day-to-day process than my logbooks (which are always recalled through my poor memory at the end of the day) and my sketchbooks (which I use a bit more intentionally, trying to work out a problem, map out a chapter, get a drawing right, etc.)

I always stamp my address in the front page.

The majority of pages are taken up with to-do lists. (I start each week with a date stamp.)

Sometimes I’m just making a note to follow up later or trying to work something out…

Sometimes thoughts come fully-formed and just need to be dictated.

Dreams and quotes (and apple stickers?)

Sketches at the art museum.

Doodle at a Bill Callahan show.

If you think about it, a map can be a sort of to-do list laid out in space. (This is a map of Maui that I drew on vacation from tour guides.)

Phone doodles.

Here I’m trying to figure out a cover for Steal Like An Artist.

When I had a day job in marketing, I doodled a lot more.

A while back, the folks at Wired asked me to make some blackouts from their recent design issue. I thought I’d play around with the whole “maker” movement, and went hunting in the magazine for all the instances of “make” and “maker” in the text.

The blackout process is tricky — often, the more I try to intentionally “do” something with it, the less spectacular the results. Like most poetry and art, the blackouts aren’t really editorials, either — so much of what they say is what the reader brings to them, or what title or captions they’re given, or what context they’re put in.

In the end, nothing really came of these two pieces, so I’m posting them here.

After 23 hours of labor, my wife gave birth to our first son, Owen Wells Kleon, on October 25th at 4:32 a.m. He came in at 6 lbs., 11 oz., 20 3/4″ long.

His birth was the most amazing feat of human strength and endurance I’ve ever witnessed. (Granted I’ve now attended exactly *one* natural childbirth.) If you know my wife Meghan, you know her brains, her class, and her charm, but in that room you would’ve seen a force of nature, something primal and powerful. I’m so unbelievably proud of her.

The day after we got back from the hospital, I gave a talk at the Texas Book Festival, and luckily John Anderson from the Austin Chronicle was there snapping a few pictures:

Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist) began his presentation on the creative process by showing off pictures of his newborn son. “I’m sure you can all tell I’m super sleep-deprived.” He inhaled his sleeve deeply. “But I am a little high on new baby smell.”

Owen’s now a week and two days old, feeding well, sleeping a little more, getting bigger and even more alert. He’s pretty much the coolest project I’ve ever worked on, the ultimate creative collaboration, and anyone who says publishing books is like birthing babies, they’re nuts — birthing babies is way, way harder, and way cooler.

If you’d like to see more pictures of him, follow me on Instagram: @austinkleon

When I was 13, I wrote to the artist Winston Smith, and he wrote me back a 14-page handwritten letter that changed my life:

15 years later, I got to meet him.

I told the whole story two days after it happened when I spoke at Pixar, and then I retold it a few months ago at UX Week and they got it on video. It’s probably my favorite talk I’ve ever given. Enjoy:

Can’t see it on mobile? Watch it here→

“The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought.”
— Ellen Ullman

I’m writing a new book. It’s my third book, and the weirdest one for me so far, because I’m writing it the way you think of someone writing a book: I had an idea for a book and now I’m sitting in the same room every day all day and trying to write it.

Neither of my other two books were made this way. Newspaper Blackout was “written” the same way I’d always made blackout poems — one at a time on my lunch break and my commute to and from work. The only difference was that I didn’t post them to my blog and I made a hell of a lot more of them than usual for about 20 weeks, then half of those pieces were thrown out and the rest were pieced together into a sort of narrative. Steal Like An Artist began as an hour-long talk written in a hotel room which was mostly adapted from over five years of online writing, that talk was turned into a 4,000 word blog post, then over two months of nights and weekends I expanded that blog post into 10,000 words and about 30 or so illustrations.

Both those books presented themselves as books after being something else online. This one is like starting from scratch.

This is what the book look liked a month or two ago — just a big stack of index cards and a few notebooks full of scribbles.

A few weeks ago I jumped over to handwriting on sheets of cardstock — essentially, really big index cards that I could then shuffle and play around with. (Above are the stairs leading up to my office filled with an insane, completely unsustainable marathon day’s worth of writing.)

I’m still working, slow and steady. I’m not quite ready to talk about the subject of the new book yet, but as I alluded to yesterday, I think it picks things up nicely from Steal, and if you’ve been following my Tumblr or my “Show Your Work” videos you have some major hints.

Right now, that messy office above is cleaned up and in the corner under the guitars is a baby swing waiting for a baby. My wife is about a week or so away from giving birth to our first son. With the baby coming, I might be pretty quiet for the next month. (I’ll probably still be updating my Tumblr and posting a baby picture or two or three on Twitter.) I’ve been told that becoming a parent lights a fire under your ass like nothing else, so we’ll see what happens!