Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for Austin Kleon

Saving things for print… and missing out

Here is my lunch (leftover enchiladas with a fried egg on top) and Amanda Petrusich’s 9,000-word profile of Metallica in The New Yorker. Petrusich is in a handful of writers I love whose work I honor by saving it to read in print, with a pen.

This practice has become harder and harder for me to maintain.

First, almost everything shows up online before the magazine or the paper gets here. This isn’t a huge deal, it just requires a little patience, which I am happy to practice.

Second, and much worse, a lot of stuff is now edited down for print and expanded in digital. A profile will have more photos, an interview will run much longer, etc.

If you only read in print, you actually miss out on stuff.

For example, yesterday I shared this “By The Book” interview with Sam Lipsyte. This morning Matt Bell reposted it with this unfamiliar bit:

I will often read passages from my favorite writers to remind myself how some people really just know how to give it up, by which I mean give up their secret dreaming selves, with honesty and artistry. Their example lifts me, emboldens me, when I am feeling depleted and paltry.

How on earth did I miss that quote? I thought. Because it didn’t run in the paper! It was edited out of print and only shows up on the website.

I do my best reading in print with a pen, so now I guess I have to honor my favorite writers by reading everything they write twice: once in print, and once in digital to discover the bits the publication cut for print.

On today’s ride

I came up the hill at Walnut Creek this morning and saw this hawk, perfectly indifferent to humans, dogs, and bicycles alike.

Working with the garage door open

my old garage studio, august 2017

Once upon a time in Austin, Texas, you could walk around in the evening and see people tinkering in their garages, working with the garage door open.

Robin Sloan says that’s how we all should be working:

This isn’t a time for “products”, or product launches. It’s not a time to toil in secret for a year and then reveal what you’d made with a shiny landing page.

Rather, I believe it’s a time to explain as you go. Our “work”, in an important sense, is to get into each other’s heads; to blast out cosmic rays that might give rise, in other minds, to new ideas.

In other words: Show Your Work!

Signs of compost

Keeping in mind Ann Patchett’s “I am a compost heap,” every time I pass the local community garden,  I feel like the signs on the compost heap could stand in for various stages of the book-writing process.

Two quotes

At this risk of this blog just being a back-and-forth with Alan: I love his “twoquotes” tag on his blog, where he simply juxtaposes one quote with another.

I’m coming up on the second anniversary of keeping my commonplace diary, and all year I’ve been putting one quote beneath another quote, letting them talk to each other:

Sometimes I am intentional with the juxtaposition, saving a quote for the right day, but the really fun juxtapositions are the random ones when the meaning reveals itself only after the ink is dry.

Heading into my third year, it’ll be interesting to see if this still works with three, then four, then five…

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.