Austin Kleon

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Shut up and write the book (5 things that have helped me recently)

book writing flowchart

1. Shut up and write the book.

I’m an extreme extrovert, which is really great after I write a book and I have to go out into the world and talk to people about it, but not so great when I need to sequester myself long enough to actually get some real writing done. I do most of my thinking “out loud,” which means ideas don’t really come to me until I’ve expressed them — if I express them through speech, I’m less likely to turn around and go express them in writing…

aqua notes dry-erase marker

2. Use the bathroom.

I get a lot of good ideas getting ready in the morning — if I have an idea in the shower, I write it down on my Aqua Notes pad, and if I have an idea after I step out of the shower, I’ll use a dry-erase marker to write it on the bathroom mirror.

old setup got rid of the external monitor

3. Fix that mise en place.

Mise en place is a French cooking term that means “everything in place.” It’s used to refer to the way chefs will have all of their ingredients organized and ready to go before they start cooking. For writers, I think it’s equally important to have your workspace organized and ready to go, nothing in your way.

I made a slight adjustment to my desk recently that made a world of difference — I raised my external monitor up slightly, so I could set my laptop in front of it, then I got rid of my external keyboard. Now, when I sit down, I can just open up my laptop and get to work — if I need the extra monitor for research or design work, I can plug it in, but most of the time I don’t even use it.

Rooster Pepsi machine in a cave

4. Less notification, more meditation.

It might be an obvious point, but it’s crazy how many of my devices tout their ability to distract me as an intelligent feature. The dumber I make my devices, the smarter I feel. Notifications I’ve killed:

  1. I turned off all notifications on my iPhone.
  2. I quit using Tweetdeck on my laptop.
  3. I turned off my Gmail Notifier.

As for meditation, it’s pretty simple:  I put my kid down for a nap, sit at the top of the stairs, set my iPhone timer for 10 mins, and close my eyes. That’s it. I’ve been doing it on and off for about a month and a half and I’ve felt less angry, less stressed, lighter.

More about meditation here. (Above are some crazy visions I’ve had while meditating.)

reserach research

5. Stop researching.

I’ll let Steven Johnson take this one:

Email and social media and games are obvious distractions. In my experience, the more subtle threat — particularly for non-fiction writers — comes via the eminently reasonable belief that you’re not ready to start writing, because you haven’t finished your research yet.

David McCullough agrees:

There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.

Okay! Back to writing.

If you liked this post, you might like my book, Steal Like An Artist. 

On writing post-fatherhood

working to the baby monitor

I’ve been working on a new book since last July. Back in October I wrote, “I’ve been told that becoming a parent lights a fire under your ass like nothing else, so we’ll see what happens.” Ha.

I made a promise to Owen before he was born that I would not use him as an excuse to fail at The Thing I needed to do.

Oh sure, I would use him as an excuse for plenty of other things I didn’t want to do, like answer emails or attend various social functions, but I would not use him as an excuse to give up on The Thing.

Writers are constantly looking for excuses not to write, but there’s nothing more pathetic than a man who blames his family for not being able to write.

I got lucky and spawned / it terrifies me

This is not to say that I wasn’t worried about becoming that pathetic father. Oh, I worried.

Right after Owen was born and we were still in the hospital, this woman got on Twitter and sent me half a dozen tweets about how she just knew Steal was written by somebody without kids, and just you wait, mister. She then proceeded to quote passages from the book, followed by little ejaculations like, “Ha! Try that when you’re up at 3 a.m. with a crying baby!”

Now, I have been on the internet a long time. I get a lot of emails from people who are, as far as I can tell, sad, awful, or completely insane. I have a pretty good firewall that filters what I let get to me.

This woman got to me.

It is one thing to have The Asshole in your brain, it is another thing to have a stranger hold a megaphone up to it and let it shout.

That woman’s tweets haunted me for that first month of survival mode, where it’s a great day if you get a shower, a hot meal, and a few hours of sleep. Maybe this really is it, I thought. Maybe it really is all over.

Now I’m on the other side of it all, and it hasn’t been easy getting back into the swing of The Thing — in fact, it’s been way harder than I expected. But I’d like to tell all would-be parents (and especially dads!) out there:

Don’t listen to these parents. They are using the precedent of their failures to predict your own. 

For every tired, overworked, bitter parent who tells you how much you won’t get done when you have kids, there’s a parent like John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, who talks about cradling his son in one arm, and picking out melodies on the piano with the other. Or George Saunders, who stole time from his office job for seven years to write the stories that would become CivilWarLand In Bad Decline. Or any number of moms and dads who make it work and make the work. They are out there. Find them. Hang out with them. Ask them how they do it. Let them be your role models.

Jung said, “Nothing has a stronger influence…on their children than the unlived life of the parents.”

You owe your kid food, safety, and love, but you also owe him your example. You give up on The Thing, and then when the kid grows up, he might give up on His Thing, too.

So don’t give up on The Thing.

Scenes from a book-in-progress

“The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought.”
— Ellen Ullman

I’m writing a new book. It’s my third book, and the weirdest one for me so far, because I’m writing it the way you think of someone writing a book: I had an idea for a book and now I’m sitting in the same room every day all day and trying to write it.

Neither of my other two books were made this way. Newspaper Blackout was “written” the same way I’d always made blackout poems — one at a time on my lunch break and my commute to and from work. The only difference was that I didn’t post them to my blog and I made a hell of a lot more of them than usual for about 20 weeks, then half of those pieces were thrown out and the rest were pieced together into a sort of narrative. Steal Like An Artist began as an hour-long talk written in a hotel room which was mostly adapted from over five years of online writing, that talk was turned into a 4,000 word blog post, then over two months of nights and weekends I expanded that blog post into 10,000 words and about 30 or so illustrations.

Both those books presented themselves as books after being something else online. This one is like starting from scratch.

This is what the book look liked a month or two ago — just a big stack of index cards and a few notebooks full of scribbles.

A few weeks ago I jumped over to handwriting on sheets of cardstock — essentially, really big index cards that I could then shuffle and play around with. (Above are the stairs leading up to my office filled with an insane, completely unsustainable marathon day’s worth of writing.)

I’m still working, slow and steady. I’m not quite ready to talk about the subject of the new book yet, but as I alluded to yesterday, I think it picks things up nicely from Steal, and if you’ve been following my Tumblr or my “Show Your Work” videos you have some major hints.

Right now, that messy office above is cleaned up and in the corner under the guitars is a baby swing waiting for a baby. My wife is about a week or so away from giving birth to our first son. With the baby coming, I might be pretty quiet for the next month. (I’ll probably still be updating my Tumblr and posting a baby picture or two or three on Twitter.) I’ve been told that becoming a parent lights a fire under your ass like nothing else, so we’ll see what happens!

Show Your Work! Episode 3: Chain Smoking

Watch it in HD quality→

Due to the slow scheduling of the publishing industry, there’s usually a significant interlude between when you finish your book and when the book is released into the wild. Jonathan Lethem calls this “the gulp” — your book no longer belongs to you, but it doesn’t belong to readers yet, either. Add to that gulp the one or two months of intense publicity you have to dedicate to the book post-release, and if you’re not working on something new during that time, you’ve spent a ton of time not working.

I went through a funk after each of my books dropped, because I didn’t start anything new until a month or two after the publicity schedule from the last book wound down. Lucky for me, the questions and the byproducts from the previous book turned into the next book — Blackout‘s leftovers became Steal, and Steal‘s leftovers have turned into what I’m working on now — but each time, it was rough getting back into the swing of things.

Then I watched a documentary about Woody Allen and how he doesn’t take breaks in between movies. And thinking about that led me to make this little video…

Watch the other episodes of Show Your Work→

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