Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for Notes on writing and drawing

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.

To find a form that accommodates the mess

sketchbook diagrams of narrative forms suggested in Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode

In a 1961 interview, Samuel Beckett pointed out “the mess” of modern life, “this buzzing confusion.”

“The confusion is not my invention.  We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion.  It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in.  The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.  It is not a mess you can make sense of.”

The Poetry Foundation helps explain:

[Critic David] Hesla notes that the dilemma which confronts the contemporary writer, according to Beckett, “is constituted… by the fact that the writer must take seriously two opposed and apparently irreconcilable claims to his allegiance. On the one hand, he must recognize that the principal fact about modern man’s life is that it is a ‘mess,’ a ‘confusion,’ a ‘chaos.’ On the other hand, the writer, as artist, has an obligation to form. But to admit the ‘mess’ into art is to jeopardize the very nature of art; for the mess ‘appears to be the very opposite of form and therefore destructive of the very thing that art holds itself to be.’”

Beckett said we could no longer keep out the mess, because “it invades our experience at every moment. It is there and it must be allowed in.”

What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be a new form; and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Seems as good of a mission statement as any.

Relocate your darlings

Looking at this manuscript by Jean-Paul Sartre, I was reminded of the writing advice, “kill your darlings,” which is widely attributed to Faulkner, but can be traced to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s lecture, “On Style,” from On the Art of Writing:

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

You hear this murderous advice all over the place: Kill your darlings.

Stephen King, in On Writing:

kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

Colson Whitehead:

Don’t fall in love with the gentle trilling of your mellifluous sentences. Learn how to “kill your darlings.”

Ira Glass:

It’s time to kill. And it’s time to enjoy the killing. Because by killing, you will make something else even better live. Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

This is a very important point — like with gardening, when you cut dead things back, you encourage new growth — which is echoed by Mary Karr, who routinely throws out hundreds of pages:

I’ve just pitched out 150 pgs it took 3 years to write: NORMAL!!! Some pieces may make it into the new draft but am basically starting over. The old pages stood in line for me to write them. So despite having 0 pages, I’m closer than before

Some writers like Diana Athill suggest a gentler but still ruthless approach:

You don’t always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they’d be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it’s the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)

The trouble with murdering your darlings, as with all editing, is knowing what to cut out and what to leave in. (Writers employ editors for the same reason doomed pet owners leave euthanizing to their veterinarians.)

“The hardest thing is to kill your darlings,” says Paula Uruburu. “But you have to.”

Or someone has to.

I think “kill your darlings” has done more good than damage in the world, but I’m a much bigger fan of this advice, which is easier on my heart: Relocate your darlings.

“One of the most difficult tasks is to rigorously delete what has no function,” writes Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes.

This becomes much easier when you move the questionable passage into another document and tell yourself you might use them later. For every document I write, I have another called “xy-rest.doc,” and every single time I cut something, I copy it into the other document, convincing myself that I will later look through it and add it back to where it might fit. Of course, it never happens — but it still works.

One of my favorite writers, Eliza Gabbert, has built a whole revision strategy around this idea, which she summarizes as: “Keep your best line (or image or idea) and trash the rest.”

She calls this the opposite of the murder your darlings advice, and suggests starting a whole new piece around your darling:

Start a whole new file. (Or, if you write longhand, turn to a new page.) In other words, don’t just keep making changes to the same version. You need to be able to see your darling in a new context. This will also help you start fresh without feeling like you’ve abandoned your other lines – they’re not deleted, they’re not dead, they’re just sleeping in another file. You can always go back to them. (I’ve actually used the same line or idea or image, if I was really in love with it, in multiple published poems. There’s no law against self-plagiarism!)

This advice has saved me over and over again, and it can also lead to new work. I’ve  chopped a whole section of darlings from one book only to have them fit beautifully into another.

And what is a blog if not the perfect place to put your murdered darlings? (David Markson once referred to the internet as “that first-draft world.”)

I think of it this way: not murdering the darlings, but relocating them, so you might re-home them later.

Nobody wants to read a book

“It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy. Nobody wants to read your shit.”
—Steven Pressfield

I posted this innocuous photo of our living room bookshelves the other day and people started asking me all kinds of questions, like, “How do you organize your books?” (I don’t) and “What’s the book you gift the most?”

Sacrilegious for someone of my profession to say, maybe, but I don’t like giving people books unless they’re 1) books they’ve asked for 2) really nice editions of books they already love. Otherwise, it feels like giving someone work. “Did you read that book I gave you yet?!?” (You, though, you should buy lots of my books and gift them indiscriminately. Ha!)

Reading a book requires, by today’s dismal standards, an enormous investment of time and attention, and the writer either honors that investment or suffers the consequences.  (As Vonnegut told us, a writer has to be “a good date.”)

In the first major interview with legendary comedy writer John Swartzwelder, “sage of The Simpsons,” he says:

Nobody wants to read a book. You’ve got to catch their eye with something exciting in the first paragraph, while they’re in the process of throwing the book away. If it’s exciting enough, they’ll stop and read it. Then you’ve got to put something even more exciting in the second paragraph, to suck them in further. And so on. It’s exhausting for everybody, but it’s got to be done.

I posted this photo and people asked me where I got the chair

But if you know you have to honor the reader’s time and attention with “good” work, how do you ever get the guts to sit down and write?

You have to be willing to be bad, first, and write a shitty first draft.

That is the whole trouble.

Swartzwelder suggests working with time, and the overnight magic of put it in the drawer, and walk out the door:

I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.

As the interviewer, Mike Sacks, summarized the method: “Create an imperfect world and then improve it.”

(Sacks has published two collections of interviews with comedy writers worth your time: Poking a Dead Frog and And Here’s The Kicker. And Swartzwelder’s novels are here.)

Okay, now I’m off to make something bad that I will fix later!

Morning pages (and variations)

“Of all the self-help tools I’ve tested through the years,” Oliver Burkeman (author of The Antidote) writes in his latest issue of The Imperfectionist, “one has proved more enduring than the rest: Morning Pages.”

Julia Cameron writes about morning pages in The Artist’s Way and her shorter spin-off, The Miracle of Morning Pages. She says:

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. *There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages*– they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU4pyiB-kq0

Schoolhouse Rock (and De La Soul) taught us: 3 is a Magic Number.

Somewhere in the ancient mystic trinity
You get three as a magic number
The past and the present and the future
The faith and hope and charity
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number

Is this some Hippie Shit? Yes. But, as Oliver notes, it is Hippie Shit that seems to work!

I do three pages minimum in my diary every morning. It’s not exactly freewriting, more old-fashioned diary, mixed with the occasional comics and diagrams.

My method is cribbed from The Sedaris Method: write things down all day in a pocket notebook, then wake up the next morning, fill out my logbook, and then write longhand about yesterday.

When I don’t know what to write about I answer “The Best Thing” prompt or draw until I feel like writing.  (This morning I wrote about banana bread and palm trees.)

I often do some combination of mind-mapping or what Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction calls “clustering”: starting in the middle of a page, writing a word, putting a box or circle around it, then writing another word, etc., until I have a tree or web. (Maps are magic, too.)

I do this very slowly, and let one thing sort of lead into the other. It’s like emptying out the junk in your brain. The reason I sometimes prefer it to straight prose on notebook paper is that you can more easily see the connections between all the weird crap on your mind. (There’s a blank “mind map” in The Steal Like An Artist Journal.)

I recently found out that the director Harmony Korine does a deranged version of this kind of non-linear map-writing to come up with ideas for his films. Watch the video above (if you dare) to see it in action.

David Byrne, “A History of Mark-Making, ” 2002

In David Byrne’s book of tree drawings, Arboretum, he writes that diagrams like these are “an eclectic blend” of:

…faux science, automatic writing, satire, and an attempt to find connections where none were thought to exist — a sort of self-therapy, allowing the hand to say what the voice cannot. Irrational logic, it’s sometimes called. The application of logical scientific rigor and form to basically irrational premises. To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense. The world keeps opening up, unfolding, and just when we expect it to be closed — to be a sealed, sensible box — it shows us something completely surprising.

Emphasis mine. (See: “The value of nonsense.”)

“There’s a general attitude here that’s well worth cultivating,” Oliver writes, “a healthy scepticism toward the part of your brain that’s so enthusiastic about controlling how things unfold. You just do the pages, and something else does the rest.”

Here, I think, is something else valuable to be uncovered from the morning pages: just as you let go and let the pages unfold, in some small way, you’re also training yourself to let your day unfold. To, hopefully, be as improvisational and playful in filling your day as you were about filling your notebook.

Aggravation is my muse

One of my recent tape quilts

I laughed out loud in self-identification when I read this description of Regis Philbin in his NYTimes obituary:

“Aggravation is an art form in his hands,” wrote Bill Zehme, the co-author of two Philbin memoirs. “Annoyance stokes him, sends him forth, gives him purpose. Ruffled, he becomes electric, full of play and possibility. There is magnificence in his every irritation.”

“It me,” as they say. I have to be agitated to really get down to work. Stirred up. A little angry.

I’ve decided it’s better to work with it than to wish it away, so, when I am beginning a new project, I often ask myself, “What’s something you despise in the culture that you wish were otherwise?” and I go from there.

Blind contour drawings

For the past week, I’ve been making a blind contour self-portrait — drawing without looking at the page — each morning to warm up my diary.

If you look at the images in order, it looks like my face is re-arranging itself. I love that.

My friend Wendy MacNaughton assigns these drawings in her workshops. My friend Jason Polan used to do a lot of his Every Person in New York drawings this way.

Sam Anderson, one of my favorite writers, wrote a wonderful Letter of Recommendation for blind contour drawing five years ago in the New York Times. (How in the hell did I miss that?)

He wrote of his frustrations with trying to draw in his adult life: “The problem, fundamentally, was one of control — I had too much of it, over too tiny a territory, and I wasn’t willing to surrender it. You can’t control your way out of control.”

(I’m thinking of Brian Eno’s control <–> surrender diagram that he likes to draw.)

Then an artist friend suggested to him he draw without looking at the page.

“For the first time in my adult life, I was genuinely surprised by something I had drawn.”

He later discovered that blind contour drawing is an old art school exercise:

Freshmen at art school are forced to draw blindly for hours. It’s the fastest way to break them out of old bad habits, to make them unlearn lifeless conventions. The goal of blind drawing is to really see the thing you’re looking at, to almost spiritually merge with it, rather than retreat into your mental image of it. Our brains are designed to simplify — to reduce the tumult of the world into order. Blind drawing trains us to stare at the chaos, to honor it. It is an act of meditation, as much as it is an artistic practice — a gateway to pure being. It forces us to study the world as it actually is.

(You can see Sam’s drawings on his Instagram. And go read Boom Town while you’re at it.)

I think a lot of people come to contour drawing in Betty Edwards’ classic book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, but I actually prefer the way Kimon Nicolaïdes writes about it in his 1941 book, The Natural Way to Draw. (Edwards sort of waves away Nicolaïdes’ emphasis that “students imagine that they were touching the form as they drew,” but I find his multi-sensory emphasis much more convincing than her left brain / right brain explanation.)

Nicolaïdes writes:

Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see — to see correctly — and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye. The sort of ‘seeing’ I mean is an observation that utilizes as many of the five senses as can reach through the eye at one time. Although you use your eyes, you do not close up the other senses — rather, the reverse, because all the senses have a part in the sort of observation you are to make.

He tells the reader to sit close, learn forward, and sync up a point on the thing being drawn with the eye while simultaneously syncing up pencil to paper. “Imagine that your pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper. Without taking your eyes off the model, wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching that point on the model upon which your eyes are fastened.” He says only then should you start to move your eye and pencil along the edges of the thing being drawn, slowly, slowly. “Be guided more by the sense of touch than by sight.”

This exercise should be done slowly, searchingly, sensitively. Take your time. Do not be too impatient or too quick. There is no point in finishing any one contour study. In fact, a contour study is not a thing that can be ‘finished.’ It is having a particular type of experience, which can continue as long as you have the patience to look.


If you’re looking for a way to loosen up and bring life to your drawings, try drawing without looking at the paper.

Hands in motion

Gjon Mili, photo of the juggler Stan Cavenaugh, 1941

Looking at Gjon Mili’s remarkable photographs of humans in motion, I was reminded of all the drawings in Jason Polan’s Every Person in New York with more than two hands or arms:

“I only draw the person while I can see them,” Jason said. “The majority of the drawings are done (mostly) while I’m looking at the person, not at the paper.”

If they move or get up from a pose, I cannot cheat at all by filling in a leg that had been folded or an arm pointing. This is why some of the people in the drawings might have an extra arm or leg — it had moved while I was drawing them. I think, hope, this makes the drawings better.

It does.

One method of writing

Before anyone asks: here’s what kind of notebooks I use.

“I make sure I never face a blank page.”
—Lydia Davis

One method of writing (that works for me):

Make note of every dumb thought that occurs to you throughout the day.

Tomorrow morning, pick the thought you think is the least dumb and write more about it.

Repeat ad infinitum. (Or ad nauseam. You know, whatever works…)

Education is not a race, it’s an amble

“Race to the Top; what a horrid metaphor for education. A race? Everyone is on the same track, seeing how fast they can go? Racing toward what? The top? The top of what? Education is not a race, it’s an amble. Real education only occurs when everyone is ambling along their own path.”
—Peter Gray

One of the things I love about Lydia Davis’s advice to writers in her collection Essays One is that she is explicit that the writer’s education should be mostly self-directed.

Here are points 2 and 3 in full:

2. Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting or writing. Trust your own interest. I have a strong interest, at the moment, in Roman building techniques…. My interest may pass. But for the moment I follow it and enjoy it, not knowing where it will go.

Let your interest, and particularly what you want to write about, be tested by time, not by other people—either real other people or imagined other people.

This is why writing workshops can be a little dangerous, it should be said; even the teachers or leaders of such workshops can be a little dangerous; this is why most of your learning should be on your own. Other people are often very sure that their opinions and their judgments are correct.

3. Be mostly self-taught.

There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you. I have found that pursuing my own interests in various directions and to various sources of information can take me on fantastic adventures: I have stayed up till the early hours of the morning poring over old phone books; or following genealogical lines back hundreds of years; or reading a book about what lies under a certain French city; or comparing early maps of Manhattan as I search for a particular farmhouse. These adventures become as gripping as a good novel.

I love those verbs: following your interests, pursuing them, trusting that they will lead you somewhere.

Ambling along your own path… even if it’s deep into an unknown woods…

Related read: “Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?”

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

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