Austin Kleon

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

Finding something new to say

Our dear friends are letting us stay in their house and this is my office for the week. I plan to practice on that Wurlitzer every morning and read and write in that cozy chair.

I feel ready to start on The Next Book. Or at least, I feel ready to think about it.

I have been listening to Bill Callahan’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest on repeat. Here’s “Writing”:

It feels good to be writing again
Clear water flows from my pen
And it sure feels good to be writing again
I’m stuck in the high rapids as night closes in
It feels good to be singing again
Yeah, it sure feels good to be singing again
From the mountain and the mountain within

It’s been five years since the last album and it’s obvious that Callahan found something new to say. He got married.  He had a kid. His folks died. And then he wrote these new songs about it all. “It feels good to be writing again…”

A reporter asked Erykah Badu why she wasn’t recording and this is what she said:

I just don’t have anything to say. As a songwriter, you have to kind of have something to say, something to record, something to ignite a conversation. I don’t have anything right now. I guess I’m uploading information. After that, we’ll see.

Finally! I thought to myself. Somebody just comes out and says it. 

Input and output. Import and export.

I was reading another interview with Rob Delaney, recovering from the death of his son and wrapping up Catastrophe: “What he wants now is some time to sit and think about what to say next.”

Same here.

Found notes to myself

About five years ago, I came home from a walk with my wife and wrote down this list. I found the scraps yesterday when going through some flat files.

Most of it I still agree with. (It’s always a bit disappointing when you agree so much with your former self — good thing I no longer believe in linear progress!) Except for #13. You don’t have to play “The Game,” whatever that is. There are alternatives. (Start by reading Thoreau.)

I’d sit down today and make another list, but really, that’s why I wrote Keep Going. (“Sisyphus mowing the lawn” became “Every day is Groundhog Day.”)

Next, please (a few notes on stuttering and writing)

My six-year-old stutters. It doesn’t stop him. Not yet. Hopefully not ever.

Yesterday, I was in the kitchen trying to read Philip Larkin. Owen was doing his best to terrorize the rest of us. He rarely stutters when he reads or sings, and he has a weakness for recording, so I handed him Collected Poems, turned to “Next, Please.”

“Why don’t you read that for voice memos?”

I hit RECORD and he read the whole freaking poem, start to finish, stumbling only on four words. (“Expectancy,” “armada,” “wretched,” and, yes, “tits.”) I couldn’t believe it.

“Why don’t you set it to music?” I said. He agreed, and I sat him down with my laptop.

We re-recorded the four mistakes, then I transferred the voice memos to the computer and we spliced them into the first take with Audacity. We cut a couple of slight stutters out of the waveform, too. Then I dumped it into Garageband and let him go to town.

This is what he came up with. (With a few level adjustments by me. It’s great if you follow it up immediately with “Loveheart.”)

I love the juxtaposition of Owen’s sweet voice, with the ominous synth lines underneath.

In Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and a the Quest for a Cure, Benson Bobrick notes that Philip Larkin began to stutter at the age of 4 and it didn’t really let up until the age of 35.

Larkin’s terror of situations in which speaking could be avoided found its way sub rosa into one of his most somber poems, “Next, Please.” Although obviously about disappointed hopes and the inevitability of death and extinction, the poem’s title phrase was one he had dreaded hearing as a child, for it signaled his imminent obligation to speak once he reached the head of a line.

In fact, even in his thirties, Larkin had trouble with postal clerks and getting tickets at the railroad station. (He used to hand slips of paper over with his desired train.)

Larkin isn’t the only one of my favorite writers who stuttered.

Another is Joe Brainard, who said, “Writing, for me, is a way of ‘talking’ the way I wish I could talk.” He recalls his stuttering in his masterpiece, I Remember:

I remember how much I used to stutter.

I remember one day in gym class when my name was called out I just couldn’t say “here.” I stuttered so badly that sometimes words just wouldn’t come out of my mouth at all. I had to run around the field many times.

I remember trying to memorize Shakespeare so that words that began with sounds I stuttered on (s, b, etc.) would not begin with a new breath.

Have you ever heard of a “lipogram”? It’s a word game. A writing constraint. You try to write without certain letters.

A few books have been written as long lipograms. In 1939, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel called Gadsby without the letter “e.” Georges Perec, a member of Oulipo, wrote his own book without “e”: A Void. (In French,  it was originally La Disparition, or  “The Disappearance.”)

This kind of constrained writing, or avoidance, is the kind of mental gymnastics many stutterers do in their heads all the time.

The novelist David Mitchell (author of, among others, Black Swan Green, a novel about a teenager with a stammer) wrote a terrific essay about his stammering, “Lost for Words.” Every stutterer, he writes, collects “a box of tricks”:

By the age of 15 I was a zit-spattered thesaurus of synonyms and an expert on lexical registers. At my rural comprehensive, substituting the word “pointless” with “futile” would get you beaten up for being a snob because the register’s too high—it’s a teacher’s word—so I’d deploy “useless.”

The Paris Review asked him if his stammering made him a writer:

On one hand, yes: it makes sense that a kid who can’t express himself verbally would be driven to express himself on the page instead. On the other hand, no: most writers aren’t stammerers and most stammerers aren’t writers. Perhaps the best answer is that the writer that I am has been shaped by the stammering kid that I was, and that although my stammer didn’t make me write, it did, in part, inform and influence the writer I became.

In the The New York Times: “What feels like a curse when you’re younger can prove to be a long-term ally.”

James Victore. (Notice the tenses here — you have to survive childhood first.)

Here’s author Darcey Steinke in her recent essay, “My Stutter Made Me a Better Writer”:

The central irony of my life remains that my stutter, which at times caused so much suffering, is also responsible for my obsession with language. Without it I would not have been driven to write, to create rhythmic sentences easier to speak and to read. A fascination with words thrust me into a vocation that has kept me aflame with a desire to communicate. As a little girl, I hoped my stutter would let me into the secret world of animals. As an adult, given a kind listener, I am privy to something just as elusive: a direct pathway to the human heart.

Having a disability can uncover weaknesses in our mainstream clichés. Not even a week after Steinke published her essay, Jake Wolff published “A Stutterer’s Guide to Writing Fiction,” in which he takes on the creative writing commandments to “find your voice” and “read your work out loud.” The trouble is laid out in the subtitle: “How do you find ‘voice’ in your writing when your own voice sometimes betrays you?”

[L]ost in this discussion of voice and flow is always disability: the way, for some of us, speech and sight and sound often stutter or simply don’t work at all.

This is not a call to arms against voice, which communicates something important about writing and point of view. But I am, maybe, calling for a greater understanding of the ways in which voice is not always “findable”—it is not a sunken treasure that, once recovered from the sea, allows you to become a Real Writer.

I am not sure yet if Owen’s stutter will make him a better writer, but I think it might just make me a better writer. It forces me to be patient while listening, yes, but it’s given me a research interest. Something new to read and think about. Another lens to look at the world through. (I feel so grateful for having read Andrew Solomon’s Far From The Tree and Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes, as both those books gave me a way of thinking about difference and disability as things that can enrich our lives.)

More connections to make between the things I love.

Related reading: “The Hard Way.”

An intercourse with the world

“The What-Ifs,” 2015

“I’ve never planned anything. I haven’t had any career at all. I only have a life.”
—Werner Herzog

A few days ago a woman on Twitter asked me, “Do you find it ironic that your biggest impact has been made not with your art, but your art and writing ABOUT being an artist?”

I immediately thought of W.H. Auden, who died almost half a century ago, but said, “It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” (He wrote a funny poem called “On The Circuit” about his speaking gigs.)

But to answer the original question: I don’t even think of myself as an artist anymore. I’m a writer who draws. (A title I stole from Saul Steinberg.)

All I ever wanted to do was be part of the world I loved. The world I discovered in books and art and music. I want to be part of it. I don’t care how or in what capacity.

Being a professional writer now means I can be a professional reader. Montaigne said he made bouquets out of other men’s flowers, but he was the one who provided the string to tie them together. I like that image, except bouquets eventually die, and the great thing about books is that they are paper bouquets that never die: they can be torn to their pieces and rearranged indefinitely.

Karl Lagerfield died this week, and he said: “Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.” If books are drugs, then maybe my books are just gateway drugs that lead to better ones. I’m more than okay with that!

But again, what’s the point, here? Why do I even write books in the first place?

It’s just to join in the fun. To be part of that world that I love. To be in a chain that goes backwards and forwards, no matter how puny my link.

Nathaniel Hawthorne said in his 1851 preface to his Twice-Told Tales, that they were “not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart… but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world.” Oliver Sacks snatched this phrase up for his end-of-life reminiscence in Gratitude:

I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

What more could you ask for?

The space in between the writing

“You don’t need an app, you need someone gently to tell you that you should consider the possibility that writing is not just about writing, it’s also (and maybe mainly) about the space in between the writing, when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head.”
— Jenny Diski

The ideal routine

This schedule went viral on Twitter with the caption: “Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing routine is the ideal writing routine.”

It’s a lovely, lovely thing, but it should be pointed out that it was an “ideal” routine for her, too, as she says in the 1988 interview it’s excerpted from. (Left out: “I go to bed at 10:00 p.m. If I’m at the beach there would be one ore two long walks on the beach in that day. This is a perfect day for me.”)

I’m sure that life got in the way a lot for her, just like it does for all of us. In fact, I was just thinking about her take on interruptions the other day when a mother wrote to me about the crush of having young kids and trying to work. I sent her this quote:

“Babies eat books. But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together; and they are only babies for a couple of years, while writers live for decades…”

I love how her schedule doesn’t exclude mundane ordinary things like housework or dinner. “An artist can go off into the private world they create, and maybe not be so good at finding the way out again,” she said. “This could be one reason I’ve always been grateful for having a family and doing housework, and the stupid ordinary stuff that has to be done that you cannot let go.”

I also love how much time is set aside for reading. (Stephen King says he writes all morning and reads all afternoon.) It’s too easy when you’re writing full time to feel like you should stuff every single minute with writing, even when you know reading is a huge part of your job.

“Don’t feel guilty if you spend the first 90 minutes of your day drinking coffee and reading blogs,” Nate Silver once advised young journalists. “It’s your job. Your ratio of reading to writing should be high.”

Even after you achieve great things, that guilt might still linger. Here’s director Paul Thomas Anderson:

I still have trouble reading a book during the day because it somehow feels indulging… You know, like oh, my – this is so naughty. I’m actually reading at 10 o’clock in the morning. I think it’s just your upbringing – something about like you got to go to work, and you’ve got to – and move on. And still even – this is how I make my living. I still feel guilty. 10 o’clock, I mean – and it’s – but I’ve sunken into the pleasure of it – to think, my God, I’ve got my life in a way where I can read a book in the middle of the day.

I love that last sentence so much. I’ve always thought a great question for sorting out your life is: “What do you want your days to look like?”

The (surprisingly long) history of the cut-up technique

David Bowie making cut-ups

William Burroughs’ cut-up technique has directly influenced so much of contemporary culture that it’s hard imagine that there was long a history of literary cut-ups before him. (It reminds me of Brian Eno’s line: “Naming something is the same as inventing it.”) Here’s how Burroughs explained it:

The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different–(cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise) — in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Heresay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like.

Bowie’s cut-up lyrics for “Blackout”

I remember reading Burroughs’ (amazing) Paris Review interview, and discovering that he actually found out about the technique from his pal Brion Gysin. It sent me on a search for other precursors, which I detailed in the history section of Newspaper Blackout. Here’s the excerpt on Tristan Tzara, who was making cut-ups 30 years before Gysin:

I kept digging, and upon reading Paul Collins’ 2004 Believer piece “The Lost Symphony,” I found out about Caleb Whitefoord, a neighbor and best friend of Benjamin Franklin, who was doing a form of cut-ups in the late eighteenth century:

It was Whitefoord’s genius to notice that when you took a broadsheet newspaper of tightly set columns, and started reading across the paper’s columns—rather than reading down to the column’s next line—you could achieve what he described as “coupled persons and things most heterogeneous, things so opposite in the nature and qualities, that no man alive would ever have thought of joining them together.” Whitefoord called this cross-reading, and he was so amused by it that he would publish sheets of his favorite specimens and hand them out to friends in Fleet Street coffeehouses:

Dr. Salamander will, by her Majesty’s command, undertake a voyage round—
The head-dress of the present month.

Wanted to take care of an elderly gentlewoman—
An active young man just come from the country.

Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in,
and afterwards toss’d and gored several Persons.

Removed to Marylebone, for the benefit of the air—
The City and Liberties of Westminster.

Notice is hereby given—
And no notice taken.

The Rolling Stones doing cut-ups, from Stones In Exile

It seems like I keep filling in little bits here and there over time. Just this week I learned about Lewis Carroll’s “Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur” (a reversal of the Latin adage, poeta nascitur non fit, or, “a poet is born, not made”) which answered the question of “How do I be a poet?” in 1883:

For first you write a sentence,
And then you chop it small;
Then mix the bits, and sort them out
Just as they chance to fall:
The order of the phrases makes
No difference at all.

Reading aloud

I’m proofing the third pass of Keep Going. I find it really difficult at this stage of a project to get the right perspective — “fresh eyes” — for the thing, which makes it really, really hard to make edits.

The production schedule for this book has been much more accelerated than any of my other books, so my usual device for estranging myself from the text — the plain ol’ passing of time — hasn’t been quite as helpful.

The device that has: reading aloud.

I find that reading my work aloud makes it weird enough that I can’t scan or gloss over anything.

Reading to an audience is best, because you start really judging the thing when you have to project it into a room full of people. Quentin Tarantino says he likes to read his scripts to his friends, not for their feedback, but their presence. “I don’t want input, I don’t want you to tell me if I’m doing anything wrong, heavens forbid,” he says, “But I write a scene, and I think I’ve heard it as much as I can, but then when I read it to you … I hear it through your ears, and it lets me know I’m on the right track.”

I don’t have the time (or the friends) to bother with such a table reading, and I don’t want to pester my wife any more than I already do, so an (admittedly expensive) solution I’ve found is to put on my headphones and fire up my podcasting microphone and pretend I’m recording the audiobook. I don’t know why exactly this works, but it does. (I think it’s being able to hear my voice through the headphones.)

I mistakenly triggered one of the accessibility settings on our family TV that I can’t figure out how to turn off, so when we’re watching PBS with the kids now, in addition to the dialogue, a calm voice explains everything happening onscreen. I borrowed that for proofing the illustrations: when I get to the visual sections of the book, I’ll narrate what’s going on in the illustration, and read any text that appears. That actually helps me look at the illustration and see if there’s anything that needs fixing…

Self-help as oxymoron

Matt Haig, Reasons To Stay Alive

After I wrote a long post about self-help, I listened to an interview with Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. I had completely forgotten the beginning of that book:

LOOK, UNLESS YOU’RE WRITING ONE, A SELF-HELP book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of how-to books, for example. And it’s true of personal improvement books too. […] None of the foregoing means self-help books are useless. On the contrary, they can be useful indeed. But it does mean that the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry.

In the interview, Hamid talks more about what he learned from writing in the self-help format:

…what I liked about the self-help book form was I started to realize that in a way I actually do write novels to help myself. You know, I sit by myself in a room for several years, which isn’t a normal thing to do, and out of it comes a novel. So there is some degree of self-help just in writing a novel. But also when I read a novel, I feel like there is a kind of self-help going on there too, that I’m going beyond myself, transcending myself, I’m encountering another consciousness, I’m leaving the place where I am.

To repeat Josh Shenk, writing is self-help, because “we’re writing to help ourselves.”

Ideas in cars, honking

I’m catching up with the latest season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, which I used to enjoy,  but now seems like it should be renamed Rich People in Expensive Cars Getting Coffee and Looking Nervous About Not Having Proper Seatbelts.

There was one great spot in the Dave Chappelle episode, though, that I felt was worth transcribing and sharing. Seinfeld asks Chappelle whether he feels like, knowing he can do a great TV show, he shouldn’t try to do another one.

CHAPPELLE: Sometimes the offering drives. If I [have] an idea, it should drive. It’s like the idea says, “Get in the car.” And I’m like, “Where am I going?” And the idea says, “Don’t worry, I’m driving.” And then you just get there.

SEINFELD: The idea’s driving.

CHAPPELLE: Sometime’s I’m shotgun. Sometimes I’m in the f—ing trunk. The idea takes you where it wants to go.

SEINFELD: That’s great.

CHAPPELLE: And then other times, there’s me, and it’s my ego, like, “I should do something!”

SEINFELD: “I should be driving!”

CHAPPELLE: Yeah.

SEINFELD: That’s not good.

CHAPPELLE: No, ‘cause there’s no idea in the car. It’s just me. That formula doesn’t work.

SEINFELD: If the idea is in the car honking, going, “Let’s go…” It pulls up in front of your house.

CHAPPELLE: That’s exactly right.

SEINFELD: “You’re in your pajamas. Get dressed!”

CHAPPELLE: “I’m not ready!” “You can go like this.” “Where are we going? What are we doing?” “Don’t worry about it. You’ll see.”

Although, there’s another great story about cars and ideas, told by Elizabeth Gilbert:

Tom [Waits], for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized.

But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, and this is when it all changed for him. And he’s speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it’s gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn’t have a piece of paper, or a pencil, or a tape recorder.

So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, “I’m going to lose this thing, and I’ll be be haunted by this song forever. I’m not good enough, and I can’t do it.” And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, “Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving?”

“Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.”

And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn’t have to be this internalized, tormented thing.

Gilbert interviewed Waits in 2002 and he elaborated on his attitude:

“Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.” This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.” Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you “like dreams taken through a straw.’ In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.

Brian Eno puts it in terms of surrender and control:

On one side of Eno’s scale diagram, he writes “control”; on the other “surrender”. “We’ve tended to dignify the controlling end of the spectrum,” he says. “We have Nobel prizes for that end.” His idea is that control is what we generally believe the greats – Shakespeare, Picasso, Einstein, Wagner – were about. Such people, the argument goes, controlled their chosen fields, working in isolation, never needing any creative input from others. As for surrender, that idea has become debased: it’s come to mean what the rest of us do when confronted by a work of genius. “We’ve tended to think of the surrender end as a luxury, a nice thing you add to your life when you’ve done the serious work of getting a job, getting your pension sorted out. I’m saying that’s all wrong.”

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere