Austin Kleon

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

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.”

Once through, cleanly

Frank Chimero’s description of how he designs a poster:

I’m a big proponent of ‘once through, cleanly’. You think about your idea, sketch, then put some glue in your chair and bang it out in one sitting. All of my best work happens this way: posters, collages, essays, outlines for talks, and so on. The work seems to be more cohesive and the energy more concentrated and palpable. If you sit down and what you make is bunk, you walk away, come back later and start over. You don’t keep any of what you’ve done before, you only retain the memory of what went wrong. It’s a silly method, but it works for me.

This is how my best work comes, too: Everything I’ve done that’s good has come really fast and furious after a (seemingly endless) period of messing around and aborted attempts.

For the book I’m working on, in between drafts, I didn’t do any cutting and pasting: I started with a clean document each time, and retyped anything I was keeping from a (printed out) previous draft. This forced me to re-read everything and fix things up as I went. Every draft was start-to-finish, and each draft had a kind of momentum to it. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t a shitty first draft, just that I started each draft with clean potential.

As always: Everybody’s different. Whatever works.

3 thoughts on a decade of publishing books

“I’ve never had an overall strategy or a plan, you know? I’ve just always wanted to show off.”
—Leonard Cohen

On this day, 10 years ago, I was offered my first book deal. Sometimes I think that all anniversaries are arbitrary and to even acknowledge them is to waste time that could be spent moving forward, and sometimes I think if you don’t stop and look back once in a while, you can never understand how far you’ve come.

Three (simple) thoughts on a decade of publishing:

1. Writing and publishing are not the same thing.

“What I wish I could have told myself when I was hopeless about my writing prospects is that I should have defined artistic success in ways that weren’t shaped by forces beyond my control… Writing and publishing are two very different things… The only thing you can control is how you write and how hard you work.”
—Roxane Gay

Writing can save your life. Writing, at its best, is a way of thinking. You put words down on a page to discover who you are and what you think. Writing is an ancient practice that helps you make sense of yourself and the world.

Publishing is simply the act of making your words public. If you nail a list of demands to the courthouse door, or photocopy a zine and leave copies all over your town, or click “publish” on a blog post, congratulations, you’ve published something.

The publishing business is just that: a business. It is the business of selling books. There’s a whole world of writing and reading that goes on outside of it, and it is possible to spend a full and fulfilling life immersed in books without having a single thing to do with the business.

The publishing business, like all businesses, can be summed up in the words of William Munny, life coach: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” People “succeed” in publishing based on whether their books sell, and whether their books sell really has nothing to do with their character or their intellect or whether the actual book is any good or not.

I was extremely lucky to take a “Publishing Marketplace” class from my writing mentor in my senior year of college. Afterwards I joked that if he taught it to freshman, there wouldn’t be any more creative writing majors.

Everyone who wants to be part of the book business should either work in a bookstore or a library at some point. My first real job out of college was working the reference desk at a public library. A good portion of the day was spent tracking down Danielle Steele and James Patterson novels for elderly patrons. I also spent a lot of time “weeding” — scanning books, checking their circulation records, and, if they hadn’t been checked out enough, putting them in a pile for the book sale (or the recycle bin). Comparing the circulation counts of the kind of books I read and wanted to write vs. the books that people actually borrowed and read was an invaluable part of my education.

2. All publishing is self-publishing.

“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”
—Jay-Z

My agent has at least 3 things he tells aspiring (nonfiction) authors:

  1. All publishing is self-Publishing
  2. Get famous first
  3. You’re CEO of your own multimedia empire

All of this can be boiled down to: Run your own show.

You’re in charge of your own show, always. Whether you self-publish or publish with a major company, you are the one who has to do most of the work. You’re the one who has to actually make up the stuff, you’re the one who has to build your audience person by person, you’re the one who has to go out there and sell the work.

Two of my favorite authors are both self-publishers, and they exist on virtually opposite ends of the commercial spectrum.

On the one, extremely lucrative end is Edward Tufte. In 1983, after Harvard University Press wouldn’t let him have a hand in the design, he took out a second mortgage on his house to self-publish The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. This led to a stunning second career after retiring from 30 years of teaching at Yale. Tufte has grossed millions of dollars from his books, and every year, he goes on the road like the Grateful Dead, selling out hotel ballrooms in cities around the country, giving his lectures. He’s stayed independent and in control throughout. The amount business he’s done out of his garage is just mind-boggling.

One the other end of the commercial spectrum is cartoonist John Porcellino, who’s been publishing his zine King-Cat for the past 30 years. John has published collections with Drawn & Quarterly, but his constant output is the zine. (He also started Spit and a Half to distribute zines and books by other creators.) Some of Porcellino’s stories have documented his struggles to make a living over the years. Recently, he’s started a Patreon, which he says has allowed him to save for the first time in his career.

Both these guys, even though they exist on opposite sides of the commercial spectrum, are about as DIY as publishing gets. I think everyone in publishing can learn something from them.

After my third book, Show Your Work!, came out in 2014, it became clear that I could probably keep eking out a living at writing for at least a few more years. But what if I couldn’t keep it up? What if I wanted to go back and get a day job and some health insurance? I took a hard look at what I was doing, and tried to lay out for myself what my show consisted of. What did I own that I could pour my efforts into that I could keep independent indefinitely? What could I do, every day, to run my show, regardless of whether I kept publishing books or not?

For me, it has always been this website and blog. (This is why I’ve been daily blogging again since October 1 last year.) My newsletter, the primary way I keep in touch with my readers, is really, in my mind, an outgrowth of this blog. It’s pretty much done the same way I started blogging in 2005: writing about what I’m thinking, pointing to stuff I love.

Every writer who wants to publish should try to think about this: What can you set up right now that is your own show that you can keep running no matter what happens?

3. Be a fan.

“I had never had any desire to be a writer. I wanted to be a reader.”
—Adam Phillips 

I actually kind of hate writing books. I often tell people I became a professional writer so I could be a professional reader, and I feel like they never believe me. What I really, really love is reading books.

Everything I do has its origins in being a fan first. I was such a fan that I desperately wanted to join in the fun, you know?

I learned how to write my stuff by being real about what I loved to read. When I got out of college, I started reading the literary magazines I thought I could try to get published in, and I quickly realized that I actually sort of hated them. Why would I try to write and submit work to magazines I didn’t even like reading? (What I really loved at the time was reading comics and design books and nonfiction books.) Also, the internet seemed much more interesting to me than any literary magazine I came across. So I started a blog.

I learned how to give a talk by attending a lot of readings and talks and drawing the speakers. Some of those speakers became friends of mine because I drew them and they then helped me along.

I learned how to draw my books by drawing other people’s books.

In my work, problems of output are problems of input. If my work sucks, it’s usually because I’m not being a good enough fan. I need to read, and read voraciously, searching for that thing that’s going to get me back on track. Read books, write books, repeat. That’s the deal.

I remember sitting in the audience during readings and wanting so badly to be the person on stage. Now I find myself relishing any chance I get to be a fan again. I love pointing to people’s work and sharing the stuff that I love. I love linking to great books in my newsletter. I love sending my agent links to good writers looking for an agent. One of my far-out dreams is to have my own little publishing imprint.

All of my favorite artists and writers, they never stopped paying attention to what was going on around them. They always remained fans first.

That’s who I want to be: Someone who’s always a fan. Always a student.

Like I say in Steal Like An Artist: All fiction is, essentially, fan fiction. Great books are written by great readers. Read the books you want to read, and if the book you want to read doesn’t exist, write it.

That’s all I know. Thanks, as always, for reading.

A bad equation


The U.S. birth rate sank to a 30-year low in 2017 (gee, I wonder why?) and the supposed clash between parenting and creativity is a hot topic in publishing. In the past half decade, we’ve seen a whole batch of mothering/art books, many of them quite wonderful, including Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write, Jenny Offill’s Dept. Of Speculation, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. A few years ago Meghan Daum published a collection of writers on their decision not to have kids, called Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed. This year there’s Meaghan O’Connell’s And Now We Have Everything and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood. (These are just the books I can name off the top of my head.)

Earlier this year, I was sitting in a theater next to someone who works in publishing (a rare event for me, believe it or not) and he said, “Yeah, you know, there’s a ton of books about art and motherhood, but not a lot new out on art and fatherhood.”

Right on time, here comes Michael Chabon’s Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve really liked Chabon’s previous writing on fatherhood, including the great essay “William and I,” from Manhood For Amateurs, which begins with the perfect line, “The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.” Another great essay was “My Son, The Prince of Fashion,” about attending Paris Fashion Week with his son, Abe.

The excerpt from Pops currently making the rounds is “Are Kids The Enemy of Writing?” Chabon recalls standing with a Famous Lit’ry Man and being warned, if he wanted to be a Great Writer, not to have children. “You lose a book,” the man said, “for every child.”

Chabon was clearly disgusted by the interaction and is more than okay with his decision to have his four children, saying he’s going to die no matter what and his books will probably be forgotten anyways, and:

Once they’re written, my books, unlike my children, hold no wonder for me; no mystery resides in them. Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back. Anyway, if, 100 years hence, those books lie moldering and forgotten, I’ll never know. That’s the problem, in the end, with putting all your chips on posterity: You never stick around long enough to enjoy it.

A beautiful thought. But what I’m puzzled by in this piece is that Chabon, though he seems like a devoted father, never really questions that equation “you lose a book for every child,” even though it is demonstrably untrue in many cases.

Take, for example, several classic children’s books. A.A. Milne made up Winnie-the-Pooh for his son, Christopher Robin Milne. Astrid Lindgren’s bedridden daughter Karin asked her to tell a story about some girl named Pippi Longstocking. C.S. Lewis convinced J.R.R. Tolkien to turn the fantastical stories he told his children into The Hobbit. The list goes on and on — and that’s just children’s books, not to mention all the art and music and film that’s been inspired by children.

I am the father of two beautiful boys, but I am not an evangelist for having children. (I mean, have you looked around?) Having children in America is difficult no matter what your profession: health care is dismal, the costs of child care are astronomical, our public education system is being stripped for parts, inflated tuition and student loans have turned higher education into a one-way ticket to indentured servitude, and adulthood, if you survive to enter it, is not all that hot, either.

No working writer with kids is able to write without a ton of help.

The bad equation “for every child you lose a book” and all that “Pram in the Hall” nonsense is the kind of toxic thinking that gives writers an excuse to be negligent parents — “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children,” Faulkner growled — but it also severely underestimates the creative potential of children.

Rather than seeing my children as a constant drain on my creativity, it has made me a better father and a better writer to see them as creative catalysts, or energizers. (See my post: “Borrow a kid.”) I have been helped along to this point by the terrific example of so many creative mothers and fathers I’ve been lucky to know, and it’s for this reason I often share, on this blog, some of the creative shenanigans the boys and I have been up to.

It’s not that my boys magically made me a better person and a better artist, it’s that my boys make me want to be a better person and a better artist.

“Art is too long, and life is too short,” wrote Grace Paley. “There’s a lot more to do in life than just writing.”

Of course, every creative life requires sacrifices, but I would encourage us to not accept the “for each child you lose a book” equation in the first place. Children, like anything else in your life, if you love them, pay attention to them, spend time with them, and reflect on your experiences with them, can lead you to your best work.

Above: drawings by my 3-year-old

What do you want to learn?

I’m finishing up The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling. Clocking in at 4 1/2 hours, the documentary presents a portrait of a man never satisfied, always searching, sort of modeling his career and life on Samsara, the endless cycle of death and rebirth.

Shandling’s diary entries are presented in little snippets throughout the documentary, and one of the of the things I wished for when watching is a longer, closer look at the pages. This morning I discovered that Garry’s friends have been posting them on his revived Twitter feed.

Shandling owed a great debt to George Carlin, who gave him encouragement when he was first starting out. Shandling adopted Carlin’s attitude towards cycles and reinvention. (Carlin famously threw out material and started fresh every year.)

What they both figured out is that the easiest way to re-invent yourself is to find something new to learn.

My book Show Your Work! is basically about learning in public — allowing people to sort of look over your shoulder as you’re working — and in chapter 10 I quote Milton Glaser, who said, “Whenever Picasso learned how to do something, he abandoned it.”

The video that quote is taken from is basically a summary of Shandling’s career, and it’s so good that I’ve transcribed a huge portion of it below (emphasis mine):

When I talk to students about the distinction between professionalism and personal development, I very often put it this way: In professional life, you must discover a kind of identity for yourself, that becomes a sort of trademark, a way of working that is distinctive that people can recognize. The reason for this is that the path to financial success and notoriety is by having something that no-one else has. It’s kind of like a brand, one of my most despised words.

So what you do in life in order to be professional is you develop your brand, your way of working, your attitude, that is understandable to others. In most cases, it turns out to be something fairly narrow, like ‘this person really knows how to draw cocker spaniels,’ or ‘this person is very good with typography directed in a more feminine way,” or whatever the particular attribute is, and then you discover you have something to offer that is better than other people have or at least more distinctive. And what you do with that is you become a specialist, and people call you to get more of what you have become adept at doing. So if you do anything and become celebrated for it, people will send you more of that. And for the rest of your life, quite possibly, you will have that characteristic, people will continue to ask you for what you have already done and succeeded at. This is the way to professional accomplishment–you have to demonstrate that you know something unique that you can repeat over and over and over until ultimately you lose interest in it. The consequence of specialization and success is that it hurts you. It hurts you because it basically doesn’t aid in your development.

The truth of the matter is that understanding development comes from failure. People begin to get better when they fail, they move towards failure, they discover something as a result of failing, they fail again, they discover something else, they fail again, they discover something else. So the model for personal development is antithetical to the model for professional success. As a result of that, I believe that Picasso as a model is the most useful model you can have in terms of your artistic interests, because whenever Picasso learned how to do something he abandoned it, and as a result of that, in terms of his development as an artist, the results were extraordinary. It is the opposite of what happens in the typecasting for professional accomplishment.

Yesterday, Dan Pink posted a video with Whitney Johnson, author of Build an A-Team. She says:

Every single person is a learning machine. You want the challenge of trying something new, figuring out how to do it, mastering it, and then starting all over again. You want to Learn, Leap, and Repeat.

As I wrote in Show:

When you feel like you’ve learned whatever there is to learn from what you’re doing, it’s time to change course and find something new to learn so that you can move forward. You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.

So, perhaps, instead of asking that dreaded question, “What next?” turn it into this question: “What do you want to learn?”

Works whether you’re 5-years-old or 85-years-old.

10 things about writing

This was today’s newsletter, but I thought it’d make a good blog post, too, so:

1. Do something small every day and it adds up. (Every day, no matter what, I blog and write in my diary.)

2. I have lots of Daily Rituals when I work: I keep everything in a banker’s box, I scatter index cards and markers around the house, I tack pictures of my heroes on a bulletin boardabove my desk, I press the sleep timer on my clock radio, and I smoke a fake cigarette pencil.

3. First drafts don’t need to be perfect they just need to exist. (More in Anne Lamott’s wonderful book, Bird By Bird.)

4. The tools matter and the tools don’t matter.

5. Notebooks double in power if you take the time to re-read them.

6. It’s way easier to get things done when you’re working on things worth doing.

7. You can spend your time on work, family, or friends, but you can only have two at a time.

8. If you’re blocked, play with blocks.

9. I can’t think about my book if I want to fall asleep at night, so I need to wind down with a good book that’s not in the genre I’m writing in. Comics and fiction work well, but what I really love is trashy rock ‘n’ roll histories, like Please Kill Me, Van Halen Rising, The Dirt, or, the one I’m reading right now, Meet Me In The Bathroom.

10. I think I have it figured out, but every time I write a book, I learn new things.

The bulletin board


I pin photos and magazine clippings and index cards on a bulletin board above my desk for inspiration when I’m writing. I keep a box up on my bookshelf labeled “bulletin board,” and whenever I start a new book, I take a photo of whatever’s left up there, clear off all the contents, and dump them in the box. Going back through the box is like digging through a little time capsule. Above is 1/3 of the current board. (Clockwise from the left: David Hockney, Sister Corita Kent, Bill Cunningham (photo by Andy Warhol), Tove Jansson, Walt Whitman, Phil Connors, Lynda Barry, Nina Katchadourian, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Marcel Duchamp, and Hannah Höch.)

First drafts

Essential reading: the “Shitty First Drafts” chapter of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird:

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or a professional, writes Lamott, when you first sit down with something new, “We all often feel like we are pulling teeth.”

Yes, agreed the late David Rakoff, “Writing is like pulling teeth…. From my dick.”

In Half Empty, he, too, talks about the necessary pain-in-the-ass of the first draft:

Writing—I can really only speak to writing here—always, always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food.

Rakoff said writing never got any easier for him. “It still only ever begins badly,” he said.

I re-read these quotes every time I’m in the middle of drafting a new book. And then I remind myself of my own motto: “It doesn’t matter if it’s good right now, it just needs to exist.”

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad life motto, either…

Seeing the days

I think you really have to see the days to know what you can do with them.

I cut up one of my calendars and taped what’s left of April to May and June and, voila, it made 10 whole weeks. I like seeing them all there, without the month headings. Makes what I’m doing seem more doable, somehow.

Something small every day…

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere