Austin Kleon

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Title matters

A page from Sara Bader’s quote collection Art is the Highest Form of Hope

So many people had good replies to my letter “Working Titles” that I felt like I had to write a followup letter, “Title Matters,” which attempts to catalog some of the different methods for titling work: combining and rearranging key words, outright theft, bibliomancy, random chance, etc. 

I’m having trouble coming up with a good title for my next book, so I’m taking heart today that Eric Carle’s classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar started out as:

Lots of digging and scratching.

Read the newsletter here.

Head, heart, and hands

“Fine art,” said John Ruskin (1819-1900), is “that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.”

Many people like to quote St. Francis (1181-1226) as saying something like, “A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.”

The problem is, he never said that. The trail lawyer and artist Louis Nizer did, in 1948, in his book, Between You and Me.

So I only quoted Ruskin in my letter, “Head, heart, hands.”

The way you wanted to feel

Last Friday’s newsletter began with a beautiful thought I had while riding my bike: 

It’s not that riding my bike makes me feel like I’m 10 years old again — it’s that riding my bike makes me feel the way I wanted to feel when I was 10 years old.

You can read the rest here.

Working titles

An Italo Calvino line from Sara Bader’s book of quotations, Every Day A Word Surprises Me

Today’s newsletter is about how hard (and how easy?) it can be to come up with titles.

It begins:

In My Life in France, Julia Child wrote about what a pain it was to come up with the title for Mastering The Art of French Cooking. She and her husband Paul debated “the merits of poetic titles versus descriptive titles.” They made lists and lists of titles, trying to come up with the right “combination of words and associations” that would work…

You can read the rest here.

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