Austin Kleon

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Better images

In Wim Wenders’ Room 666, he films a monologue by his friend Werner Herzog at the top of Tokyo Tower:

There are few images to be found. One has to dig for them like an archaeologist. One has to search through this ravaged landscape to find anything at all… I see so few people today who dare to address our lack of adequate images. We absolutely need images in tune with our civilization, images that resonate with what is deepest within us…

I’ve thought about Herzog’s words a lot in the past year. I’m always searching for images for my work, but also for my life. Looking for portraits of life outside of a default setting.

To have an imagination is simply to have the ability to make images that are not directly in front of you. When I hear people describe depression, it often sounds like the imagination shuts down— the brain just can’t make a picture of tomorrow that’s worth living for. That’s certainly what my own mild bouts of melancholy feel like: There’s just no image to hang on to, no picture I can make in my head of how life could be better.

Of course, the imagination needs to be fed. To make better images, you need to see better images.

Ursula K. Le Guin spoke beautifully of this need in her 2014 acceptance speech:

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality…. Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

Images matter. The images we hold in our mind are often the images that come true for us. When some warmongering asshole gets put in a position of power and people (even jokingly) tweet things like “we’re all going to die” (well, duh, that’s alwyas been true) we’re making bad images. So if we are to survive, we need to create and capture and share better images.

A game of chicken


My friend Dave, a few months ago, he asked me, “So what are you excited about right now?” And I couldn’t give him a good answer. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”

I relayed the question to my friend Curt, and he shrugged it off, and said, “That just means you’re looking.”

A few weeks later, I found it. I found the thing to get excited about. The thing to work on.

I was so incredibly excited about the thing I was working on, because it felt completely, 100% my own, coming to me fast, as if it already existed. As if it had always existed. I had an energy, a borderline mania, working on it. All of my parts were in alignment. It felt like I had something that I needed years ago that I think other people need, too. I worked for a solid month, and I came up with the thing, and I delivered the first version of it, and it worked. It was right. It did exactly what I wanted it to do.

And then… I let myself be talked out of working on my vision of the thing into working on something else that seemed only slightly different, but wrong. It was as if, overnight, all my energy, all of my excitement, had been sucked out of me. And I struggled for a week, trying to see the thing that I was supposed to work on. And I couldn’t see it.

This morning I walked past the bomb site and something in me snapped. What the hell am I doing? I asked my wife. She said, “You’ve let yourself be talked out of working on what you know you’re supposed to be working on.”

Now I’m back. And I can see it. And I can see a way of working on it, of making it exist, and putting it out into the world.

And nobody’s going to talk me out of it.

This post was a tantrum. (We all have them sometimes. Forgive me.)

Doesn’t feel like work

Walking around the Mission yesterday, my agent and I saw Anthony Holdsworth painting on the street. We stopped to admire his painting, chatted briefly, and then I said, “Thanks for letting us interrupt your work.”

“Doesn’t feel like work,” he said, cleaning his brush. “Feels more like play.”

Ode to my clock radio


When I need to get some writing done out in the garage, I press the S L E E P button on my old dusty AM/FM clock radio and sit down to work:


I can’t write to music with words, so the radio is permanently tuned to KMFA, our local classical station. The clock radio is across the room from my desk, so I’m never tempted to fiddle with it. It’s never turned up very loud. The music becomes background noise and I forget about it.

The S L E E P function lasts about an hour. I know when the music stops it’s probably time to get up and stretch. If I want to write for another hour, I press the button and get back to work. Easy.

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