Austin Kleon

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The writer is the composer, the reader is the musician of the book

Some “unplayable” sheet music by John Stump

In this great interview with James Hannaham, he talks about how his musical background influences his writing:

When you write pretty much anything, you’re essentially asking someone to read a musical score—to hear it in their head. So an attentiveness to sound and rhythm and meter is really useful to your aesthetic as somebody who’s putting words on a page. It’s pretty similar to putting notes on a staff, in its way.

This is also what Margaret Atwood says about writing books:

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

And also what Chris Ware says about comics:

What you do with comics, essentially, is take pieces of experience and freeze them in time….The moments are inert, lying there on the page in the same way that sheet music lies on the printed page. In music you breathe life into the composition by playing it. In comics you make the strip come alive by reading it, by experiencing it beat by beat as you would playing music…

Filed under: music

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.

They’re coming for every second of your life

In this clip from a 2019 panel on “Self Esteem in the Age of Social Media,” comedian Bo Burnham explains how social media companies are out to colonize “every second of your life”:

“They’re not even doing it consciously. It’s because these companies like Twitter, YouTube and Instagram and everything, they went public, they went to shareholders. So they have to grow. Their entire models are based off of growth. They cannot stay stagnant. [They have to] get more of you.”

I’ve been thinking about this clip for a day now. One reason I feel so lucky to be an independent writer with a great audience: I don’t answer to any shareholders but readers. I don’t have to grow my business if I don’t want to. I can do my thing the way I want to do it for the people who want it. And I can do it the way I want to do it.

This seems to me the greatest freedom and privilege, and I am trying not to squander it.

Ray Bradbury on feeding your creativity

Here’s a clip of Ray Bradbury’s advice for writers in a 2001 keynote, “Telling The Truth.”

He suggested that every night you read:

  • one short story
  • one poem
  • one essay

If you do that for the next thousand nights, he said, you’ll be full up of ideas.

This 1000-day “Ray Bradbury Challenge” came to me via Oleg V, in the comments on my newsletter about one of my favorite tools, the 30-day challenge. (It reminded me a lot of Goethe’s checklist.)

I liked it so much I went back to Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing to see if he had a little more advice along these lines.

“It is my contention that in order to Keep a Muse,” he wrote, “you must first offer food…. If we are going to diet our subconscious, how prepare the menu?”

One thing he emphasizes is that you shouldn’t just feed on what you think you should feed on, but what’s most delicious and what really nourishes you.

“I have fed my Muse on equal parts of trash and treasure,” he wrote, and that often included “comic strips, TV shows, books, magazines, newspapers, plays, and films.”

He said that nothing is lost and you must resist the urge to throw out things that meant so much to you when you were younger.

What is most important, he writes, is “the continual running after loves.”

The constant remains: the search, the finding, the admiration, the love, the honest response to the materials at hand, no matter how shabby they one day seem, when looked back on.

I’m delighted by how much of this resonates with my own methods and what I’ve practiced and preached over the years, the method of “input and output,” but the 1,000 nights advice also delights me because I spent a few Octobers ago reading a short story by Bradbury every night and it was one of the most joyous reading experiences I’ve ever had.

Finally, I took a walk this morning and listened to David Remnick’s piece on Bob Dylan in his 80s:

In order to stave off creative exhaustion and intimations of mortality, Dylan has, over and over again, returned to what fed him in the first place—the vast tradition of American song. Anytime he has been in trouble, he could rely on that bottomless source.

Sounds familiar!

A solution to writer’s block: Transcribe yourself

My Zoom H1 “handy” recorder

Stewart Brand once said to Brian Eno: “Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already — and all you have to do now is find it?”

In a similar vein, I enjoyed this story of how KC Davis, author of the brilliantly-titled How To Keep House While Drowning, wrote their book:

I had long stared at blank word documents, unable to get my thoughts on the page. I’m actually not a great writer — but I am a pretty good speaker. So I went back through my social channels and transcribed every short form video I had ever done on this topic and that left me with all these disjointed paragraphs. I spent another two months trying to decide how to connect these little vignettes into a “real” book and finally realized that my choices were to publish an imperfect book or not publish the perfect book. So I decided to make each section its own chapter — some only a page long.

I’m reminded of this advice from Matt Zoller Seitz:

Here is a technique I suggest to fellow writers who are blocked for whatever reason: just talk about the piece with a friend, record it, then play it back and write down the good stuff. This method also works with Gchat & similar programs. Go straight to document after.

And how Nicholson Baker wrote his brilliant book The Anthologist by filming himself with a camcorder:

He set up a camcorder and recorded himself presenting in various parts of his house. “I would try to rehearse what it would be like to explain something complicated, like iambic pentameter, in a familiar way,” says Baker, who also found himself singing poetry in his own barn, in Maine. “How would you explain it if you’d been thinking about it for twenty years? So I came up with 40 hours of tape and transcribed the audio.”

I suppose one could skip the transcription step by talking directly into the computer’s speech-to-text?

I know a lot of songwriters do this with song ideas: they record a bunch of voice memos on their phone, but then they make time to listen to what they’ve recorded, often on shuffle.

Regardless of the tech you use, the method is: record yourself thinking out loud, and once you’ve transcribed that into a draft: edit yourself by reading out loud.

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.

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