Austin Kleon

Want to be an artist? Watch Groundhog Day.

Whenever anybody talks about “The Creative Journey” I sort of roll my eyes. “Journey” sounds so lofty to me. So linear. Point A to point B.

Here’s a popular version of “The Creative Journey”: A genius comes to the end of his trip, closes his eyes, concentrates, and then the idea comes to him, fully formed.

When I’m working on my art, I don’t feel like Don Draper. No, when I’m working, I feel more like Phil Connors from the movie Groundhog Day.

In Groundhog Day, for those of you who don’t know or have forgotten, Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, is a weatherman who wakes up every morning on Groundhog Day?–?February 2nd?–?in Punxsutwaney, Pennsylvania, home of Punxsutwaney Phil, the famous groundhog who forecasts whether there will be six more weeks of winter. Phil Connors hates Punxsutwaney, and no matter what he does, he can’t make it out of Punxsutwaney, and he can’t seem to get to February 3rd. Every morning he wakes up in the same bed at 6AM to face the same day.

And if you remember the movie, you know there are a couple acts: first, Phil tries out everything he can possibly think of to take advantage of the situation: basically, he cheats life.

He learns people’s secrets, steals money, and seduces women, except for one in particular, his boss, Rita. He memorizes her favorite drinks and foods, learns a couple of lines of French, figures out all the right things to say, but no matter what he tries, he can’t seem to get Rita into bed.

After attempting all these shortcuts, Phil becomes super depressed.

In my favorite line from the movie, he asks his bowling buddy, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

And his buddy, who’s a little drunk, looks at him and says, “That about sums it up for me.”

Phil then attempts many, many forms of suicide.

He jumps off a building, he drops a toaster into the bathtub, he drives off a cliff with the groundhog, Punxtatawney Phil. Nothing works. Every morning, Phil wakes up at 6AM, in the same bed, in the same town, faced with the same day, with Sonny and Cher playing on the radio.

He hits rock bottom.

Finally, Phil accepts his fate. He accepts that he’s stuck in Punxatawney forever. And then things get really interesting.

He gets to know everybody in the town. He sees what problems there are in the town to solve, and how he can use his powers to help: he catches a kid falling out of a tree, he helps an engaged couple through their misgivings about getting married, he replaces a flat tire for some old ladies.

He also throws himself into his work: he crafts a super eloquent speech for Punxatawney Phil, which he presumably gives every day.

He learns French. He learns how to play the piano. He learns how to sculpt ice.

And it’s when he finally masters these things, when he’s turned himself into a person worth loving, it’s then that Rita notices him, and they live happily ever after.

Phil learns, as Hugh Macleod says in his book Ignore Everybody, “The best way to get approval is to not need it.”

Now, I’m certainly not the first person to suggest that Groundhog Day is perhaps THE great parable of our time. But I think Groundhog Day has particular relevance for artists and for people who want to do creative work.

Why I think so is clearly laid out by this quote from Ian Svenonius’s somewhat obscure, but great book, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group:

“If one becomes a lawyer, scholar, mechanist, typist, scientist, production assistant, or what-have-you, the world will commend your decision. Each day at lunch, on vacation, or at whatever party you attend, your choice will be applauded, upheld, and affirmed. And you will know what is expected of you. Even if your job is difficult?–?if you are a brain chemist, international death merchant, or rocket designer?–?your responsibilities will be obvious and your goals concrete. If you achieve them, you may be rewarded by promotion. If you fail, you might be fired or demoted, but nonetheless?–?unless your boss is insane?–?the job will have tangible parameters. [Art], however, is different. You will never know exactly what you must do, it will never be enough… no matter what change you achieve, you will most likely see no dividend from it. And even after you have achieved greatness, the [tiny number of people] who even noticed will ask, ‘What next?’”

What Svenonius is saying is that the creative journey is not linear. It’s not point A to point B. Even if your wildest dreams come true, you’re still stuck with that question of, “WHAT NEXT?”

In 2009, Elizabeth Gilbert gave a TED talk following the massive success of her book Eat, Pray, Love. She said something that was so honest, it really knocked me out:

“I’m pretty young, I’m only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it’s exceedingly likely… that my greatest success is behind me.”

She still knew, no matter how successful she was, if she wanted to remain a writer, she had to get up and write another book. And then another book. And another book.

We spend so much time in this culture celebrating fast, early success, but in so many ways, early success is the worst thing that can happen to you.

The New York Times ran a feature a few weeks ago called “Works In Progress,” which was “a very small sampling of the female artists now in their 70s, 80s and 90s we should have known about decades ago.” Everyone should read it. No one even noticed some of these women until they had about seven decades of work behind them. Somehow, they all stuck it through.

Some of my favorite documentaries of the past couple years all focused on people who are eligble for the senior discount at Denny’s.

Bill Cunningham in Bill Cunningham New York, who gets up every day, gets on his bike, and takes pictures. Joan Rivers in Piece Of Work, who, right up until her death, was playing gig after gig. And Jiro, from Jiro Dreams of Sushi, who gets up everyday and makes the sushi.

These are the people I think we should be looking to for inspiration?–
the people who every day of their lives, they get up do the work, regardless of success or failure.

Because you don’t know if or when success will come for you. The best thing you can do if you want to be an artist is to set up your life in such a way that you’re sort of insulated from success or failure.

Now, it might seem like a stretch, but I really think the best thing you can do as an artist or a creative person is pretend you’re Phil Connors in Groundhog Day: there’s no tomorrow, there’s no chance of success, there’s no chance of failure, there’s just the day, and what you can do with it.

Building a body of work (or a life) is all about the slow accumulation of a day after day’s worth of effort over time. Writing a page each day doesn’t seem like much, but do it for 365 days and you have enough to fill a novel. You do it your whole life, and you have a career.

So, if I can leave you with one piece of advice, something encouraging that I can sear into your brain, it’s this:

Figure out what your little daily chunk of work is, and every day, no matter what, make sure it gets done. If you fail, the sun comes up tomorrow, and you get another chance. If you succeed, you’re still going to have to get up tomorrow and do something else.

Should you ever start to despair at this fact, like Phil did, remember what the comic writer Harvey Pekar said: “Every day is a new deal. Keep working and maybe something will turn up.”

The creative journey is not one in which at the end you wake up in some mythical, happy, foreign land. The creative journey is one in which you wake up every day, like Phil, with more work to do.

Silence is a space for something new to happen

The Quakers: “Do not speak unless you can improve upon the silence.”

Garry Shandling: “The world is too noisy and distracted to probably ultimately survive. Everyone needs to shut the fuck up. The answers are in the silence. Monks set themselves on fire to protest and to make this point. Just consider it.”

Depeche Mode: “Words like violence / break the silence…”

Morris Berman: “It takes silence and slow time to be creative, and those things are threatening to most Americans, because they understand on some level that that’s what health is about, and that they don’t have it.”

Ursula Franklin: “Silence is not only the space in which there’s no sound, but there’s no program. Nothing is there so that whatever is essentially unprogrammable can happen. How does anything new happen? In a world where everything is scheduled, everything is listed, everything is programmed, the first thing one needs is space… You have to be open. It doesn’t mean something enormous will happen, but nothing can happen until you clear that space… Nobody has time to even receive anything that is actually new, including their own thoughts.”

Bill Callahan: “When you’re starting a song the only thing you have is silence and silence is pretty damn sweet. Once you start making some sound, it better be good because you’re ruining the silence that makes you feel good and relaxed. I feel like you can only make a sound if it’s better than silence… [I’m] very conscious of the power of nothing, the power of nothing being there. You’ll notice it’s still about the best thing anyone playing with me on a record can do is just stop playing. Because you got this instrument in your hand and it’s really fun to make the noise with it, but it means so much more when you’re not playing it.”

John Cage: “[O]ne day I got into [a cab] and the driver began talking a blue streak, accusing absolutely everyone of being wrong. You know he was full of irritation about everything, and I simply remained quiet. I did not answer his questions, I did not enter into a conversation, and very shortly the driver began changing his ideas and simply through my being silent he began, before I got out of the car, saying rather nice things about the world around him.”

Austin Chapman, a man born deaf who, through hearing aids, was able to hear again: “Silence is still my favorite sound. When I turn my aids off my thoughts become more clear and it’s absolutely peaceful. I hope that one day hearing people get the opportunity to experience utter silence.”

Hold thy tongue (and loosen thy pen)

I shared this doodle from my notebook on Instagram the other day and everyone who commented seemed to assume that it was about Writing, as in, Writing Books, or getting Work done. (See a previous post of mine: “Shut up and write the book.”)

What it was really about was the old idea of having a “loose tongue,” or saying out loud the things that you should keep to yourself. In the home, in the workplace, or on the internet. (Perhaps the phrase needs an update for the smartphone age: It’s our thumbs that get us the most in trouble these days…)

We focus so much on our notebooks as traps for capturing those rare, beautiful ideas that visit us, but notebooks are also amazing cages for detaining what is inside of us that wants so desperately to escape. To write down your rawest thoughts in a notebook is like putting a wild, unknown beast into a holding cell for further observation. Here, you can safely discover what the beast is and figure out what to do with it. Sometimes the beast needs indefinite incarceration, sometimes it needs rehabilitation, sometimes it’s ready for release into the wild, and sometimes it just needs to be put down. But to let it escape at whim is rarely a good idea.

Or, as I’ve said before, a notebook is a good place to have bad ideas.

There’s an old Quaker saying: “Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence.”

Sometimes we need to see the words before we know if they can improve the silence.

Hold thy tongue. Loosen thy pen.

What is not machine-like

“REJOICE IN HUMANNESS! Machines can’t make mistakes. If you compete with a machine on its terms YOU LOSE! So don’t reduce your writing to be like type. YOU ARE NOT A TYPEWRITER! Admit mistakes, correct them, & go right on.
—Jacqueline Svaren, Written Letters

Andy Warhol said, “I want to be a machine,” but we’ve been there and done that, and besides, he was delight-full of crap, like all great artists, because when I stood in front of those big silk-screened flowers last week they sure didn’t feel like they were made by machines. You could sense the human behind them…

“These are not yet automata.”
—Studs Terkel, Working

I remember a few years ago how triumphant I felt when the Twitter spam account @horse_ebooks turned out to be a human pretending to be a machine. Some were disappointed, but the feed seemed too weird and beautiful to me to be completely random. I was happy to see a human behind it.

“The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
—Wendell Berry

I like my machines just fine, but I’m not interested in turning into one. I’d like to remain a person. I truly believe one of the most subversive things you can do today is spend as much of your time as possible nurturing what is not machine-like in you.

All nerves

“I really don’t think the artist is an intellectual. I believe that the artist is a set of nerves.”
—Wayne White

I was paging through a catalog of the photomontage work of Hannah Höch when I came across “Angst,” a very simple collage she made in 1970 using a photograph from a 1960 Life magazine article, “Harriet’s Celebrated Show of Nerves”:

It’s not my absolute favorite collage of Höch’s, but the source material fascinated me: the article is about a college janitor who donated her body for dissection after eavesdropping on an anatomy professor complaining in one of his lectures about the availability of corpses to study. (More of the story here.)

On the second page of the article was an image that totally spooked me, because I’d seen it before — I’d found it online back in February, when my son Owen was going through a “human body” phase. I printed it out and gave it to him to copy. I then asked him to write “ALL NERVES” above it:

The drawing currently hangs in my studio. When I look at it, I think about our times, how bombarded with electrical signals we are, how close some of us are to a nervous breakdown, how we all seem to be in the business of getting on each other’s nerves —“the nerve of these creeps!”

Then, sometimes the drawing says to me: Your nerves are all you’ve got. Don’t lose your nerve. Steady your nerves. Touch a nerve.

I think of Frank O’Hara, who said of writing poetry, “You just go on your nerve.”

And Emily Dickinson, who wrote: “If your Nerve, deny you— / Go above your Nerve.”

Part of a cure

drawing won't help

“When you draw,” says Ed Emberley, “you go away. You go to another place. It’s a safe place. And it’s a real place.”

“A piece of paper is a place,” says Lynda Barry. “The thing you draw with is the way you travel through that place.”

“I make places I want to go to,” says Renee French.

“It’s sublime,” said Maurice Sendak, “to go into another room and make pictures. It’s magic time, where all your weaknesses of character, the blemishes of your personality, whatever else torments you, fades away, just doesn’t matter.”

In Jules Feiffer’s house when he was growing up, “Everything was a secret. So in order to make my own secrets, to establish my own way out of things I couldn’t understand, [I drew]. And it’s a way of not just escape, but of survival.”

“Drawing is 50,000 years old, isn’t it?” says David Hockney. “I think it comes from very deep within us. When all those people in the 1970s were trying to give up drawing, I did go and see them and they said: ‘Oh, you don’t need to draw now.’ And I did point out: ‘Well, why don’t you tell that to that little child there? Tell them you don’t need to draw and see what happens.’”

“Drawing is my way of explaining to myself what goes on in my mind,” said Saul Steinberg. “It’s not I who makes this drawing.  It’s the hand that drew that makes it.”

“As kids,” Lynda Barry says, “we went to the page to find something, to have an experience. As adults, she says, “we have it backwards.” We think that we need to have an experience before we go to the page.

Cy Twombly: “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.”

Ken Robinson tells this story: “A little girl was in a drawing lesson. [The teacher] said, ‘What are you drawing?’ And the girl said, ‘I’m drawing a picture of God.’ And the teacher said, ‘But nobody knows what God looks like.’ And the girl said, ‘They will in a minute.’”

“Drawing isn’t work,” says a character in Christophe Blain’s Isaac The Pirate. “It’s a form of prayer.”

More advice for the recent graduate

Last year I gave graduates some advice and it went like this:

  1. Treat your day like a 9-5 job. 
  2. Hang out at your local library.
  3. Take long walks.
  4. Teach yourself to cook.
  5. Keep a journal.

Here’s 5 more pieces of advice. As always, take what you need, leave the rest.

6. Find a new city.

We want so badly to emulate our heroes. We go to their lives for inspiration and we fill our heads full of romantic stories about how they made it. But we often fail to put our heroes in their proper contexts — we don’t acknowledge the environments in which these heroes came up and we try to copy what they did without updating the moves to our own situations.

Patti Smith wrote a whole book about her New York City origin story called Just Kids. But back then, she emphasizes, NYC was sort of a dump, and really, really cheap. Today, NYC is not what it was, and it is not as open or as cheap for young people. Smith now encourages young people to “find a new city.”

Ask yourself what you really need in a place to live. Find a place where you can thrive. If you’re broke and you want to do something weird and interesting that doesn’t necessarily fit into a traditional model, consider finding a place to live off the beaten path. When I was 21, I moved to Cleveland with my girlfriend. It was so cheap to live there I could work a 20-hour-a-week library job and spend the rest of my time reading and blogging. Almost everything I do now has root in what I discovered during that time.

7. Study something you love in depth.

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This is something I heard cartoonist Paul Karasik say at the end of a comics lecture.

When you find something you really love — a painting, or a book, or a movie — spend as much time as you can studying it. Stand in front of a painting for 2 hours. Re-read a book several times. Freeze-frame a movie and study the composition of each scene. Etc.

We often avoid studying the things we love in depth like this because we’re afraid we’ll miss out on all the other things that might be out there. (Some of this, I think, comes from school: we’re used to broad, survey-style courses, where you try to digest the whole history of a form in one semester. You have to stick to the syllabus — you can’t spend too much time on Homer because you have to get to Virgil!)

When I was starting out as a writer, I was in such a panic to digest as much as I could right away, I would never re-read books. I would move from one book to the next, gobbling them up. Eventually I got comfortable going back to old favorites, getting to know them in depth, discovering things I’d missed, finding connections between the things that really spoke to me. Now I value re-reading old favorites even more than reading something new.

8. Steal old stuff.

if you can't come up with your own ideas

One of the quickest ways to develop more original work is to stop stealing from people who are alive and start stealing from the dead. Dig into the past and go deep.

Everybody has a hot take to offer in these troubling times, but I tend to get more inspiration and comfort from someone like the Montaigne in Stefan Zweig’s biography, who lived 400 years ago, but never really knew life in his country without political turmoil. (By the way, he stole from the dead constantly.)

The great thing about stealing stuff from the dead is that you’re automatically forced to update their ideas and stories for your contemporary context. This act of transformation almost always makes the stuff, in some sense, your own…

9. Talk to strangers.

bored-of-life

In the book When Strangers Meet, my friend Kio Stark writes about how interacting with strangers puts us more in the present moment, makes us feel more alive. These interactions, of course, teach us things we wouldn’t know otherwise. (Richard Ford: “When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.”) When you mix with all kinds of different people, you get a bigger, more interesting picture of the world.

There’s a lot of talk about diversity on college campuses, but it usually focuses on race, gender, or religion. Economic diversity is another matter: very often the student body is rather homogenous when it comes to class. (All of my friends in college were, like me, pretty middle-class.) Depending on where you are in America, and what kind of diversity you’re looking for, a walk down a city street is liable to put you in touch with a much more diverse set of people than a college campus.

There’s one other kind of diversity that I think is undervalued in our culture: age. It struck me one day in college that I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a baby or an elderly person. (Now those are the two groups I probably come across the most: the kids on the playground or the retirees out for a morning walk in my neighborhood.) Think about offering to babysit for the little ones in your life and spending time with your grandparents or volunteering at a nursing home — there’s a lot of good that comes from such cross-generational interactions.

10. Pay attention to what you pay attention to.

The late Amy Krouse Rosenthal once tweeted, “for anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. that’s pretty much all the info u need.”

Good luck!

Further notes on scenius

“Scenius” is a term coined by musician and producer Brian Eno to counter “The Lone Genius Myth,” or the idea that innovation in art and culture comes from a few Great Chosen Ones. When Eno draws what the traditional model of genius looks like, he uses the example of the symphony orchestra, with God or the Muse at the very top of the triangle, and on descending levels, the composer, the conductor, the musicians, and, finally, the audience listening:

He then draws other organizations in our society that traditionally have hierarchical models:

When he gets to “scenius,” or what he calls the communal form of genius, he draws this:

Here’s what I wrote about it in my book, Show Your Work!:

There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.

To put it even more simply: Genius is an egosystem, scenius is an ecosystem.

Our world is an ecosystem in which our only real chance at survival as a species is cooperation, community, and care, but it’s being lead by people who believe in an egosystem, run on competition, power, and self-interest.

This was the message of the great feminist and pacifist Ursula Franklin, who said:

The dream of a peaceful society to me is still the dream of a potluck supper. The society in which all can contribute, and all can find friendship. Those who bring things, bring things that they do well. [We must] create conditions under which a potluck is possible.

When you think about your family, your friends, your neighborhood, your office, your city, your country, your world… are you operating as an ecosystem or an egosystem?

Which model we choose to operate under will determine the quality of our lives, and, arguably, our survival.

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