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.

* * *

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.

(more…)

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. 

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.

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!

Watch it in HD quality→

Due to the slow scheduling of the publishing industry, there’s usually a significant interlude between when you finish your book and when the book is released into the wild. Jonathan Lethem calls this “the gulp” — your book no longer belongs to you, but it doesn’t belong to readers yet, either. Add to that gulp the one or two months of intense publicity you have to dedicate to the book post-release, and if you’re not working on something new during that time, you’ve spent a ton of time not working.

I went through a funk after each of my books dropped, because I didn’t start anything new until a month or two after the publicity schedule from the last book wound down. Lucky for me, the questions and the byproducts from the previous book turned into the next book — Blackout‘s leftovers became Steal, and Steal‘s leftovers have turned into what I’m working on now — but each time, it was rough getting back into the swing of things.

Then I watched a documentary about Woody Allen and how he doesn’t take breaks in between movies. And thinking about that led me to make this little video…

Watch the other episodes of Show Your Work→

Here’s video of “Steal Like A Writer,” a talk I gave back in June at Cleveland’s Weapons of Mass Creation festival. It’s sort of a remix of the ideas in Steal Like An Artist geared towards designers, musicians, and anybody who wants to get better at writing. Here’s the original description:

No matter what your discipline, it’s hard to get any good work done without clear, straightforward communication. Simply put, being a good writer makes you better at your job. Using a few school supplies, a little visual thinking, and a whole lot of creative theft, this talk will help get you started on the way towards becoming a wordsmith.

Here’s the remixed list of ten:

And here are the slides:

And here are the links to the recommended reading:

• Anne Lamott, BIRD BY BIRD
• Lynda Barry, WHAT IT IS
• Scott McCloud, UNDERSTANDING COMICS
• Unsuck-it.com
• @shamblanderson’s sentence of the day

It was a fun talk to give and a really nice audience — thanks to Joseph Hughes and the folks at WMCFest for having me.

See more of my talks→

UPDATE: Wanted to share these cool sketchnotes of the talk by Carolyn Sewell:

A few things I thought a lot about while on the road touring behind Steal Like An Artist:

1. You are a traveling salesman.

Look, if you’re lucky enough to have a publisher that sends you on book tour, they’re sending you out there to do one thing: sell books.

A lot of writers don’t like to think of the commerce side of what they do, and to them I say: look at the back cover of your book. See that fucking barcode? That’s a product. Products need to be sold.

You may not want to be in sales, but the quicker you can embrace the role, the more comfortable you’ll be, and the better you’ll get at it.

Unless you wrote a shitty book, you have something every salesman dreams of: a product you believe in. Don’t be shy. Sell the thing.

Here are some things you should be doing:

• Work on your public speaking skills. Learn how to get comfortable talking in front of a group of people. Rehearse your material. Don’t go over time. Talk slower than you think you need to. Check your teeth, tie, and fly. Remember when people come to one of your events that they could be doing ANYTHING else, but they came to see you. Don’t treat that lightly. Make sure you give them a good show. Help them get something out of it.
• Carry a copy of your book with you everywhere. You don’t need a briefcase full of them, just carry one clean copy of the book on you at all times. (My agent says carry at least two, but he’s a backbreaker.) If somebody asks you about your book or what you do and you have a weirdo book like mine, it is so much easier to just hand them a copy and say, “Here it is.” And if you run into one of your heroes or someone who should have a copy, you can just give it to them. Then replace it with a new copy from your suitcase.
• Carry a business card. Yes, business cards seem silly in this digital age, but at the very least, it comes in handy during face-to-face transactions. Somebody asking you about something you don’t want to talk about? Hand ‘em a card and say, “Shoot me an email.” Done.
• Get a credit card reader from Square. Instant storefront! Quick story: I was giving a talk at a conference at 4:30 p.m. and the college bookstore was closing up before the end of my talk. I knew people would want to buy books after the talk, so the bookstore said they’d sell me a bunch of copies at cost. (50% off.) So I bought a big stack, and when walked onstage for my talk, I held up the bookstore shopping bags and said, “You want to know what it’s like to be a working author? I’m selling my own books out front after this talk.” Got a good laugh, and I made $100 profit.
• Collect emails at all your signings. I really dropped the ball on this one. Half the time I remembered to put a sign-up sheet for my mailing list on the table, half the time I forgot. Don’t skip it.

2. Invest in good gear.

Carry-on: You can’t check bags when you’re on tour, because if you lose them, you are utterly and totally screwed. My wife got me one of these hybrid carry-on/garment bags for about $70, and it worked really well for me. I put my suit and good shirts in the garment bag half and everything else in the other half. It’s got a hard shell back, so it’s pretty durable, and I never had any trouble stuffing it in an overhead. (Don’t be one of those idiots with an oversized carry-on that never fits.)

Day bag: A day bag is a bag you carry with you everywhere. (You know, a man purse.) I decided on this tour to leave my laptop at home and travel only with an iPad, so I went with this TimBuk2 Freestyle Messenger bag. It’s pretty tiny, but it has tons of pockets, so I can fit all the essentials and I stay lightweight.

Here’s what was in it:

1. iPad 2 w/ charge cable, camera connection kit, and VGA adapter. There were a few times where I wished I had a Macbook Air on me, but overall, the iPad worked great for travel and presentations. Trouble happens when a venue wants you to use their computer — just be sure to tell them ahead of time you need a VGA input. Sometimes the projector is far away from where you’re standing, but if you have an iPhone, you can get the Keynote Remote app and control the slideshow over Bluetooth.
2. Sketchbook. (See pages my tour sketchbook.)
3. Kindle Touch 3G. 
4. Copy of Steal.
5. Small paperback. For takeoffs and landings when you have to power down your Kindle.
6. Shure SE215-K Live Sound Monitors. Fancy ear buds, because I hate having to carry around noise-cancelling headphones.
7. Bandanna. For snot, sweat, tying stuff together, and other various purposes.
8. Flash drive. Had my standard slides on it, in case a venue (usually a conference) needed to use their own computer.
9. Safety scissors and tape. Believe it or not, the TSA allows scissors up to 4 inches.
10. Pens and Sharpies. Black for signing Blackout, red for signing Steal, Marks-A-Lot for making blackouts, Pilot G-2 Bold for writing.
11. Cosmonaut iPad stylus. I love this thing. Like drawing with a huge crayon.
12. Rathole $20 and quarters. Because you never know.
13. Earplugs. For on the plane and getting to sleep in noisy hotels. Don’t leave home without them.
14. Vitamins, Advil, and lip balm.
15. USB rechargeable battery. The size of a pack of gum, and it’ll recharge anything USB.
16. Chewing gum. 
17. Square credit card reader. (See above.)

3. Wear a uniform.

Travel is a lot easier when you only pack things that match and can be combined, and life on the road is way easier when you wear a uniform. Pick a uniform for your events and pick a uniform for travel and walking around the city. I never did more than 4 cities in a week, so here’s what I brought with me:

• (1) navy blazer
• (4) blue non-iron dress shirts
• (2) pairs of blue jeans
• (2) ties
• (1) one grey hoodie sweatshirt
• (1) pair of grey Adidas Sambas
• (1) grey baseball cap
• a bunch of t-shirts, socks, and underwear

I was traveling in the spring, so not only did I pack the same thing for every week, I didn’t actually put anything away when I got home — I just threw the clothes in the wash, took my jacket to the dry cleaners, and repacked everything the same way I did the week before.

4. A little germaphobia goes a long way.

Let’s face it: an airplane is basically a flying petri dish.

I used to get sick almost every time I flew, so I was terrified of flying around half a dozen times a week for a couple of months. Then I came across Daniel Pink’s travel tips — they really saved my ass. Combining them with a little bit of my own research, I came up with a method that kept me from getting sick in over 20 cities in 2 months.

Here’s what you’ll need for my (somewhat insane) flying regimen:

• a water bottle
• hand sanitizer
• Emergen-C  1000mg Vitamin C packets
• Wet Ones antibacterial hand wipes
• Neosporin

Here’s how it goes:

Once I get through security with my (empty) water bottle, I find the nearest drinking fountain, then I dump a packet of Emergen-c in the bottle and fill it up with water.

In the bathroom before boarding,  I sanitize my hands, then I coat the inside of my nostrils with Neosporin. This sounds disgusting. It is. I’ll let Dan Pink explain.

Once I get on the airplane:

• I drink a lot of water. Hydrate!
• I avoid the seat-back pocket at all costs. Those pockets are where germs go to have orgies. Do not, under any circumstances, stick your Kindle in there or browse Sky Mall. Do not do it.
• I open my air vent on full blast and aim it so the air passes just in front of my face. Airplanes have industrial air filters on them, so that air is actually cleaner than the air just sitting in the plane.
• I wipe down my tray table before using it. People eat and leave their tissues and do all sorts of disgusting things to those tables.
• I try not to touch anything. That includes other humans and other airplane surfaces.

5. Eat right, sleep a lot, and don’t drink too much.

Eat right: Best thing is to try not to eat at the airport. My favorite place on the road is Panera Bread. Their kid’s peanut butter and jelly and an apple serves any mealtime. If there was a Panera near my hotel, before I flew, I’d have them make me a couple of those and stuff them in my bag.

For emergencies, I always kept a bunch of trail mix and beef jerky in my carry-on for protein. If I was going to be in a city for a few days, I’d stop by a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe’s and buy a bag of apples.

If you need to find a good restaurant, use Yelp. When I use a little critical thinking (How many reviews? How old are they?) Yelp doesn’t let me down.

Sleep a lot: This one is tough. But basically, you need to keep your sleeping schedule as regular as possible. The way I did it was I tried to take as few naps as possible. I’d keep myself up all day, whether I was on a plane or walking around the city, and I’d make sure I was super tired when it was time to go to bed. I’d go to bed around 10 or 11 local time, no matter what time zone I was in.

Can’t get to sleep? Dan Pink recommends a Benadryl, ear plugs, and a copy of The Economist. Worked for me.

6. Let people know you’re coming.

If you want people to show up to your events, you can’t just expect the venue or the sponsor or the bookstore to bring them in. Get your ass on Twitter, Facebook, your mailing list, etc. and let people know you’re coming. I sent out big reminders about the tour to all my channels in the beginning, and then I reminded people on Twitter and Facebook the week of and the day before. I had a surprising number of people come up to me at signings and say, “I didn’t know you were in town and saw it on Twitter and came over.”

Also: tell your friends you’re coming! Ask them to breakfast or drinks. So many of my internet friends became IRL friends on this tour. That made everything so much more worth it.

7. Ask questions.

I got so incredibly sick of listening to myself talk when I was on tour. Every night, talking about me, me, me.

The antidote to the self-loathing that comes from talking about yourself constantly is listening. Turning the spotlight away from yourself and putting it on someone else. Richard Ford said, “When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.”

When one of my escorts would pick me up from the airport, I’d ask them about their lives. “How long have you lived in Kansas City? How’d you get into escorting? Who’s the biggest asshole you’ve worked with?” I heard some amazing stories.

My wife is six months pregnant, so whenever I found out somebody was a parent, I’d ask them for parenting tips.

I always asked the security guy which line was moving faster.

I asked machines lots of questions, too. (If my normal rule is Google everything, my rule on the road is “Yelp everywhere.”)

8. When in doubt, go to an art museum.

Almost every major city has some sort of halfway decent art museum — I visited at least a dozen of them on this tour. When you’re doing night events, museums are usually open exactly when you need to kill some time: from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. If you’re staying near downtown, the museum district is often pretty close by. They also usually have decent cafes for snacks.

9. Be a mensch.

(Stole this one from my agent, Ted.)

To borrow a sentence from Dan Savage, “Be good, giving, and game.”

Be good. You can’t say thank you enough. Thank everybody. Thank people for coming. Thank the book store for having you. Be pleasant. Smile. Don’t throw fits. Nobody gives a shit who you are or how tired you are. Be a human being.

Be giving. If somebody comes up and wants their book signed, shake their hand, ask their name, ask them what they’re up to. Spend a little time with them. Carry ones and tip well. Open doors for old ladies.

Be game. Be ready for anything. If the projector doesn’t work, grab a big pad of paper and draw your slides. Roll with it. If four people show up, go to the bar with them. (This happened.)  If an escort knows a good BBQ joint that’s a little out of the way, skip the nap and see some of the city you’re visiting.

10. Treat home like another stop.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

When you get home, kiss your wife, hug your dog, and try to see the place as if for the first time.

I love, love, love signing books. I’m used to people saying, “I wish I could draw,” but there have been a surprising number of folks on this tour who remark on my handwriting. Sometimes people just like it, and sometimes people are really surprised that it’s the same handwriting that’s in the book. (A lot of people think that the writing in the book is a font.)

The underlying notion here is that handwriting is somehow magical, that you’re just naturally gifted with lovely penmanship. But as I explain to folks on tour, just as I learned to draw by copying Garfield cartoons, I learned to write by copying other people’s handwriting.

My first two handwriting heroes were Phil Collins and John Lennon:

I spent hours copying their handwriting, and when I found Jimi Hendrix’s handwriting, I spent hours copying him, too:

And in my later life, some of my favorite artists have been obsessed with handwriting. Lynda Barry practices the alphabet with her brush everyday as a way to get warmed up. You can see little alphabets pop up in her drawings:

The handwriting in Steal is my attempt to rip off Maira Kalman and Steve Brodner:

As Lynda says, “In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits!” There some studies that suggest handwriting boosts the brain and that handwriting helps you learn. It’s a damned shame penmanship isn’t taught more in school.

Anyways, the point is: handwriting, drawing…it’s all marks on the page. The way towards better handwriting is explained in chapter two of Steal: start copying. To paraphrase Jack Kirby, if you like the way a man writes, steal his hand. Copy him. As you’re copying his writing, the copy will mutate, and you’ll find your own hand.

For more on handwriting, check out my “handwriting” tumblr tag→

My new book, Steal Like An Artist, is in bookstores today! You can also buy the paperback or ebook online:

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• IndieBound
• Powell’s
• iBooks

If you buy a copy before midnight tonight, you can enter to win my brand-new, framed 11×14 Newspaper Blackout print from 20×200 here.

You can read the nice things folks have been saying about the book here.

If you’d like to blog about the book, images and video are in the Blogger’s Kit.

If you like the book, a good review on Amazon helps tremendously.

Let me know how you like it on Twitter: @austinkleon