Austin Kleon

A renewable energy

I have been working like a maniac lately, cranking out words. I expect a crash soon, but for right now, I’m trying not to lose momentum. When I’m working like this, I feel like my brain is on fire, and I remember why so many writers are alcoholics: when you’re thinking so intensely all day, sometimes booze is the only thing that will calm you down.

Something else I’ve noticed in this frenzied state: my creative energies aren’t really sapped if I switch over to other projects. My son will ask me to draw a new page in the book we’re writing together, or I’ll need to write a blog post for the day, and it just doesn’t faze me. I finished a first draft of something this morning, and I was up and looking around for something else to do, Hulk-ed out, like, “WHAT NOW? COME AT ME!!”

I’m also internalizing, finally, what Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life:

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.

Creative energy is a renewable energy. Right now, I’m all charged up. I know that soon I’ll need to recharge again, but for now, baby, I’m burning, burning, burning.

Fancy zines


I think of all my books as fancy zines.

Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? I’ll let Wikipedia handle this:

A zine (/zi?n/ZEEN; short for magazine or fanzine) is most commonly a small-circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images, usually reproduced via photocopier. Usually zines are the product of a person, or of a very small group.

When I’m working on a book, sure, I flip through my bookshelves, looking for stuff to steal, but what I really love to do is head over to my zine drawer (see above) and flip through zines.

Even though my books are printed in mass quantities overseas and are shipped all over the world, I want my books to feel handmade, like they’ve just come off the photocopier.

Back in December, I wondered in my diary if I should just go ahead and do a real zine, and work my way up to a book:

Maybe next time. Or maybe the country will collapse and this tweet will come true:

There’s something really special about zines. “Zines Had It Right All Along.” “The Internet Didn’t Kill Zines.” Even though “The Blissfully Slow World of Newsletters” can feel close to the spirit of zine culture, nothing digital seems to fully replace them. “A blog is not a zine.”

Whenever I do a workshop with students, zines are the perfect thing to make together: We make a bunch of blackout poems, each choose our favorites, and then we sequence them, everybody getting their own page. Then we run them on the photocopier, fold ’em, staple ’em, and everybody gets to take one home:

If you want to learn more about zines, check out this book and hit up your public library — several libraries actually have zine collections now! The new Austin Public Library has a whole section next to the comics:

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