Austin Kleon

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Mapping your books

A list is one thing, but making a map of the books you’ve read often reveals connections between them that you might have missed. (More in Tuesday’s newsletter: “A cluster map of books.”)

Homework every night for the rest of your life

Filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan once said, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”

That’s the thing about the job: you’re never “off.” If “everything is copy” (Nora Ephron) then you’re always “on,” even when it looks like you’re doing nothing. (Arm yourself with Gertrude Stein, if only as a joke: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”)

“All things are potential paragraphs for the writer,” wrote Shirley Jackson in her lecture, “Memory and Delusion” (collected in Let Me Tell You):

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

The “always on” thing can feel like a curse, but it’s also a blessing: it means that any boring old experience (grocery shopping, getting stamps at the post office, picking your kids up from school) can become potential fodder for the work, so you’re “always on,” always paying attention, alert, awake to life, alive, casing the joint, looking for stuff to steal.

Watering the garden

“Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them.”
—Psalm 126:6

“I climb up on the house / weep to water the trees”
—Guided By Voices

Another tearful week in our crumbling empire. At our house, we’re taking pleasure in our garden beds. Elsewhere, bad seeds are bringing forth rotten fruit, but here, good fruit is coming in. We’ve eaten a few strawberries plucked right off the plant. The tomatoes are getting bigger.

The more I learn about gardening, the richer the metaphor for creative work. This week I’m learning more about composting. On a recent bike ride, Hank gave me a mini chemistry lesson in exothermic and endothermic reactions, anaerobic vs. aerobic decomposition, chemical bonds, carbohydrates, etc. I even got to stick my hand in to feel the heat of the heap.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes how she has “fullblown chlorophyll envy,” and wishes she could “photosynthesize” so that she could “be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.” It’s hard not to envy the plants, who seem to know how to grow without anybody’s help. They know what to do without asking.

Lawrence Weschler’s Taxonomy of Convergences


Here is a map in my diary of Lawrence Weschler’s “Taxonomy of Convergences” that the writer has been working out in the past five issues of his Substack.

His idea of “convergences” — when something resembles something else, or makes you go, “that reminds me of…” and you make “free associative linkages” — has been a big influence on me. (See my blog tag: “Convergences.”)

Here is an example of a convergence from Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences: 

late Rothko vs. the moon landing

In this recent taxonomy, Weschler proposes a spectrum of things that resemble one another, ranging from an imagined but not real connection (“apophenia”) to a connection that is being deliberately concealed (plagiarism).

The only trouble is that these marvelous pieces have been sort of buried in his numbered Substack issues, so I’m hoping by sharing these images from my diary and direct links to the pieces, maybe it’ll make you want to click through. It’s a lot to sift through, but it rewards the sifter.

First up is an introduction to the concept of “convergences.”

Second is Apophenia, Chance/Accident, and Affinity, or “inchoate projections, vague coincidences and misty affinities” in which there is no real underlying connection other than the one we make.

The third installment is “Co-Causation,” or “that part of the widening spectrum where if things happen to look alike, it’s because they’re likely to be drawing on the same sorts of sources.”

The fourth installment covers “Direct Influence” and “Invocation,” or, “the kind of things that happen as one artist or thinker or group of such artists or thinkers impacts upon another—both forward and backward, and consciously and unconsciously.”

The fifth installment covers Allusion, Quotation, Appropriation, Cryptomnesia, and Plagiarism. (My favorite of the batch.) Weschler ends at a point on the spectrum in which things resemble each other for a reason, but the reason is being hidden from us.

I suspect that some of us are wired to see these convergences more than others. But I also think this way of seeing is very infectious. (I call it “the world keeps showing me these pictures.”)

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