Austin Kleon

Mac and Jules and Jon

Here’s a picture of Mac Barnett, my son Jules, and Jon Klassen at the Texas Book Festival. Jules has grown up with their books and loves to draw and tell stories, so this was a really special moment.

We loved watching them read from their new one, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, hearing about their process, and learning how to draw a goat:

They’re coming for every second of your life

In this clip from a 2019 panel on “Self Esteem in the Age of Social Media,” comedian Bo Burnham explains how social media companies are out to colonize “every second of your life”:

“They’re not even doing it consciously. It’s because these companies like Twitter, YouTube and Instagram and everything, they went public, they went to shareholders. So they have to grow. Their entire models are based off of growth. They cannot stay stagnant. [They have to] get more of you.”

I’ve been thinking about this clip for a day now. One reason I feel so lucky to be an independent writer with a great audience: I don’t answer to any shareholders but readers. I don’t have to grow my business if I don’t want to. I can do my thing the way I want to do it for the people who want it. And I can do it the way I want to do it.

This seems to me the greatest freedom and privilege, and I am trying not to squander it.

Ray Bradbury on feeding your creativity

Here’s a clip of Ray Bradbury’s advice for writers in a 2001 keynote, “Telling The Truth.”

He suggested that every night you read:

  • one short story
  • one poem
  • one essay

If you do that for the next thousand nights, he said, you’ll be full up of ideas.

This 1000-day “Ray Bradbury Challenge” came to me via Oleg V, in the comments on my newsletter about one of my favorite tools, the 30-day challenge. (It reminded me a lot of Goethe’s checklist.)

I liked it so much I went back to Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing to see if he had a little more advice along these lines.

“It is my contention that in order to Keep a Muse,” he wrote, “you must first offer food…. If we are going to diet our subconscious, how prepare the menu?”

One thing he emphasizes is that you shouldn’t just feed on what you think you should feed on, but what’s most delicious and what really nourishes you.

“I have fed my Muse on equal parts of trash and treasure,” he wrote, and that often included “comic strips, TV shows, books, magazines, newspapers, plays, and films.”

He said that nothing is lost and you must resist the urge to throw out things that meant so much to you when you were younger.

What is most important, he writes, is “the continual running after loves.”

The constant remains: the search, the finding, the admiration, the love, the honest response to the materials at hand, no matter how shabby they one day seem, when looked back on.

I’m delighted by how much of this resonates with my own methods and what I’ve practiced and preached over the years, the method of “input and output,” but the 1,000 nights advice also delights me because I spent a few Octobers ago reading a short story by Bradbury every night and it was one of the most joyous reading experiences I’ve ever had.

Finally, I took a walk this morning and listened to David Remnick’s piece on Bob Dylan in his 80s:

In order to stave off creative exhaustion and intimations of mortality, Dylan has, over and over again, returned to what fed him in the first place—the vast tradition of American song. Anytime he has been in trouble, he could rely on that bottomless source.

Sounds familiar!

Comfort work

In last Tuesday’s newsletter, I wrote about “Comfort Work”:

We talk about “comfort food” and “comfort viewing” but I’ve never heard anybody talk about “comfort work.”

Comfort work is work that I do when I don’t know what else to do.

I know I need to work, but I don’t know what I should be working on, or I can’t work on the thing I should be working on because I’m too tired or depressed or otherwise unmotivated.

Comfort work must be comforting and it must be actual work. This sounds simple, but it’s an odd combination. Comfort work is work I’ve done before that I know I can do, but it still must present enough of a challenge to be considered actual work.

Readers filled the comments with their own forms of comfort work. Read more in the newsletter.

Starting from scraps

 

I think about this paragraph from David Rakoff’s Half Empty quite a bit:

Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one’s least attractive, that sometimes it’s just easier not to do anything. Writing — I can really only speak to writing here — always, always only starts out as shit: an infant on 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.”

Hence, the necessity of shitty first drafts.

This is one reason I love collage so much — it’s very easy (for me) to take scraps and junk and push these pieces around, glue them to each other, and keep layering until it pleases me. This collage, for example, was started with random pieces of tape that I’d stuck to a worktable that was in storage for 2+ years while I had the new studio built. 

Here’s what it looked like when I started:

I’m constantly on a quest to make writing more hands on — more manipulative, in the sense that you’re using your hands to shape it. The more I treat writing like one of my collages, the better it gets. (One reason I love the blackouts.)

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