Austin Kleon

The ideal routine

This schedule went viral on Twitter with the caption: “Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing routine is the ideal writing routine.”

It’s a lovely, lovely thing, but it should be pointed out that it was an “ideal” routine for her, too, as she says in the 1988 interview it’s excerpted from. (Left out: “I go to bed at 10:00 p.m. If I’m at the beach there would be one ore two long walks on the beach in that day. This is a perfect day for me.”)

I’m sure that life got in the way a lot for her, just like it does for all of us. In fact, I was just thinking about her take on interruptions the other day when a mother wrote to me about the crush of having young kids and trying to work. I sent her this quote:

“Babies eat books. But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together; and they are only babies for a couple of years, while writers live for decades…”

I love how her schedule doesn’t exclude mundane ordinary things like housework or dinner. “An artist can go off into the private world they create, and maybe not be so good at finding the way out again,” she said. “This could be one reason I’ve always been grateful for having a family and doing housework, and the stupid ordinary stuff that has to be done that you cannot let go.”

I also love how much time is set aside for reading. (Stephen King says he writes all morning and reads all afternoon.) It’s too easy when you’re writing full time to feel like you should stuff every single minute with writing, even when you know reading is a huge part of your job.

“Don’t feel guilty if you spend the first 90 minutes of your day drinking coffee and reading blogs,” Nate Silver once advised young journalists. “It’s your job. Your ratio of reading to writing should be high.”

Even after you achieve great things, that guilt might still linger. Here’s director Paul Thomas Anderson:

I still have trouble reading a book during the day because it somehow feels indulging… You know, like oh, my – this is so naughty. I’m actually reading at 10 o’clock in the morning. I think it’s just your upbringing – something about like you got to go to work, and you’ve got to – and move on. And still even – this is how I make my living. I still feel guilty. 10 o’clock, I mean – and it’s – but I’ve sunken into the pleasure of it – to think, my God, I’ve got my life in a way where I can read a book in the middle of the day.

I love that last sentence so much. I’ve always thought a great question for sorting out your life is: “What do you want your days to look like?”

If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first

It’s been said a million times — it’s one of the main points of my books Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work! — and yet, it still seems to be controversial or confusing to young people who are starting out: If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.

“You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader.”
—J.K. Rowling

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut… If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”
—Stephen King

“Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
—Annie Proulx

“The ugly fact is books are made out of books.”
—Cormac McCarthy

“Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees.”
—Terry Pratchett

“Read, read, read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!”
—William Faulkner

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting.”
—Ray Bradbury

“When I’m reading, I’m looking for something to steal. Readers ask me all the time the traditional question ‘Where do you get your ideas from?” I reply: ‘We are all having ideas all the time. But I’m on the lookout for them. You’re not.’”
—Philip Pullman

A hacked street sign in LA, 2015

“Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
—Nora Ephron

“I find it weird to meet writers who aren’t also big readers. Met one the other day at a bar and I looked at him queerly. He said he couldn’t find the time. This reminded me that readers are probably my people first, before writers. Writers are more likely to be dicks.”
—Rosecrans Baldwin

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

“I don’t enjoy writing. I enjoy reading.”
—William Giraldi

“If only you’d remember before you ever sit down to write that you’ve been a reader much longer than you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world [you] would most want to read…”
—J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction

“If you feel the urge to write, just lie down and read a book: it will pass.”
—Fran Lebowitz

The electric toothbrush theory of relativity

At some point in time, I forget when, my wife bought us electric toothbrushes.

Here is how the electric toothbrush works: The manual divides your mouth into four zones and when you turn on the toothbrush you are supposed to clean one zone for 30 seconds until the brush vibrates and you move to another zone until your 2 minutes are up and the motor stops.

One thing I quickly learned practicing this sleek mode of oral hygiene is that I have no internal sense of how long 30 seconds actually takes. Sometimes 30 seconds is barely enough time to touch all the zone’s teeth and sometimes by the end I feel like I’ve repeated the zone’s row over and over.

I often spend the 30 seconds harmonizing with the tone the motor emits. I took the toothbrush over to the piano one day and determined it plays in the key of C, although if you switch it into sensitive mode, it drops a half a step down to B. I pick different songs, but I’m never sure how many lines I can get in before I have to switch zones. (I’m reminded of how my wife used to measure the length of her commute by how many times she could play Calexico’s cover of “Alone Again Or” on repeat.)

If I can’t keep a sense of what it’s like to pass 30 seconds, how am I supposed to have a sense of a morning, a day, a week, a month, a year?

“A year is short,” writes someone who traveled nonstop for a year. I’m not so sure I believe her. This toothbrush has unloosened any confidence I have in what it takes to pass any length of time. The worst part is that I can’t go back again: my teeth just don’t feel clean anymore without it.

Let the chips fall where they may

A draft of JFK’s remarks at Amherst College, 1963

Well, here is a coincidence: after I blogged about the Richard Serra quote on coming to a Y in the road in Leonard Koren’s What Artists Do and how it reminded me of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” I read further into the book and came across John F. Kennedy’s speech on the role of the artist in American life. He gave it in 1963 at Amherst College for the groundbreaking of a library named in honor of… Robert Frost. Not only that, but Koren notes that Kennedy quoted “The Road Not Taken” in his remarks:

All this requires the best of all of us. And therefore, I am proud to come to this College whose graduates have recognized this obligation and to say to those who are now

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I hope that road will not be the less traveled by, and I hope your commitment to the great public interest in the years to come will be worthy of your long inheritance since your beginning.

And so, it seems, Kennedy, a big Frost fan (Frost supported him in the race against Nixon and spoke at his inauguration), sort of got the poem wrong, too, or at least just quoted the famous bit.

No matter. The rest of Kennedy speech is worth reading:

The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover’s quarrel with the world….

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society–in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.

Read the rest here, or listen to it, below:

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