Austin Kleon

A few notes on daily blogging

I’ve been wanting to write about the habit of daily blogging I’ve taken up since Oct. 1st this year, but I’ve avoided it, because 1) there are so many other interesting things to blog about 2) I’ve worried that blogging about blogging is too recursive and it will open up some sort of evil dimension or will just jinx the good mojo I got workin’. Still, I want to give it a (hopefully quick) spin.

The idea started out from my anxiety about “stock and flow.” As Robin Sloan wrote seven years ago: flow is the feed (“It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.”) and stock is the durable stuff (“It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.”)

In Show Your Work!, I wrote that it was always my M.O. to turn flow into stock: tweets become blog posts that become book chapters that become books. Trouble is, I had failed to heed Robin’s warning:

I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

Not only was I not turning flow into stock, I became acutely aware that due to the slow (or fast?) decay of social media and algorithm tinkering, the flow wasn’t even doing what it used to do —“remind people you exist”—  and worse, my bits were just getting sucked into a void, an archive that I could download, maybe, but probably never go back and mine for any gold. Turning flow into stock isn’t all that hard, but it gets exponentially harder the more flow you have to go back and sift through.

Also, quite frankly, Twitter turned into a cesspool almost overnight. My friend Alan Jacobs was very vocal about his split from Twitter, and after reading his vibrant blog and new book, How To Think, I just decided to give daily blogging a go again, and this time, to do it on my URL, on my old-school WordPress blog, like the old days, when blogging actually meant something to me.

So how’d it go? Well, so far, even better than I expected.

1) I had no idea how badly my writing muscles had atrophied. After a couple of weeks, I could feel the sentences coming easier.

2) After struggling to come up with a new book idea for so long, I could start to see all the connections between posts, the patterns, the idea planets I keep orbiting. Because it’s all in one place, hyperlinked together, I can see my own obsessions in a way that is much harder elsewhere. (Also: I’m owning my turf. This place has been around for a dozen years. Longer than Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram, and if I had to bet, I’d guess it will outlast them.)

3) I had forgotten how wonderful blogging is as a mode of thinking. Blogging is, for me, more about discovering what I have to say, and tweeting more about having a thought, then saying it the right way. It’s also great to be able to go as long or as short as you want to go.

4) Maybe most surprising, is that my posts have gotten, in my opinion, much deeper and more interesting. I used to scramble on Thursdays, trying to come up with a good blog post so I could post it at the top of Friday’s newsletter. Often I would cop out, write something quick and pat, and move on. Once I started daily blogging, not only did I have more to link to, it’s actually better stuff — some weeks I have a tough time deciding which post gets top billing in my list of 10. (I hope you’ll subscribe, btw, if you haven’t already.)

There’s a story about perfectionism in David Bayles and Ted Orland’s excellent book, Art & Fear: 

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

With blogging, I’m not so sure it’s about quantity as much as it’s about frequency: for me, there’s something kind of magical about posting once a day. Good things happen. Something small every day leads to something big. (Seth Godin has championed daily blogging for years—he just passed his 7000th post.)

5) Maybe I’m weird, but it just feels good. It feels good to reclaim my turf. It feels good to have a spot to think out loud in public where people aren’t spitting and shitting all over the place.

Anyways, I hope I can keep it up for as long as possible. Thanks for reading.

I wanna dance with (or without) somebody


I was born in ’83, so I have a soft spot for 80s pop, especially the kind of stuff they played on 94.7 in Columbus, Ohio, “Sunny 95” (a rounding up that always confused me), which my mom listened to non-stop at the pool and in her ’86 Honda LX-I. (“Playing the 70s, 80s, and today!”)

A pop pinnacle of those days, for me, is Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” a song that’s so perky (and also a steal from Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”) but also has this tinge of sadness beneath it — a bit of lyrical dissonance — which, when you think about it, pop music has always been full of, but there were lots of my favorite cases from that era: Prince’s “1999” (nuclear war), Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” (about Vietnam vets) and “Dancing in the Dark” (a song about writer’s block!), Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks” (teenage runaways), etc. Those are the kinds of songs I really love: sad songs with a beat.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion is like Sunny 95 in a blender, and her song, “When I Needed You,” pulls off that 80s blend of lyrical dissonance really well. “The song sounds really happy now,” she says in an episode of Song Exploder, “but it’s a really sad demo.” She said it was nice to hide to the original emotion (inspired by a messy break-up) underneath a dance track, so it wasn’t so “all out there.”

I’ve been listening to so much Jepsen lately, but nobody else in my house wants to hear her. I’m reminded, again, of Whitney Houston, but for another reason: I once read a New York Times article from 1994 about her cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” which chronicled how sick everyone was of the song, so much so that it had inspired various criminal acts, like when a mother of two threw her upstairs neighbors’ stereo out the window:

“It was driving us all up the wall,” Ms. Hall told a local newspaper at the time. “I had just had enough.” The incident, in fact, became one in a series of several — all, oddly enough, in England — at the height of the song’s popularity. In October, a 20-year-old woman from Middlebrough County was reportedly sentenced to seven days in jail after she played “I Will Always Love You” so loudly and so often that her neighbors complained of psychological torture and the police charged her with noise pollution.

We all want to dance with somebody, but, it seems, sometimes we must dance alone… with headphones.

We do not breathe well


“The remembrance of my country spoils my walk,” said Emerson’s friend, Henry David Thoreau, 3 years later, to a crowd of 2,000 people, gathered on the 4th of July, 1854, in front of a “black-draped American flag hung upside down.” (Detail from Laura Walls’ wonderful bio.)

They were both talking about the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, but their words can easily speak for some of us now, 160 years later.

A bit more from Emerson’s speech: “one cannot open a newspaper without being disgusted by the new records of shame…a man looks gloomily at his children, and thinks, ‘What have I done that you should begin life in dishonor?’”

My twitter friend @debcha said it’s the 19th-century equivalent of how she’s described this last year: “A DDOS attack on people with empathy.”

Make something for somebody


I love it when I see knitters out in the world, knitting. I like to imagine that they’re knitting something for someone: a scarf for their sick friend, maybe, or a blanket for a baby who hasn’t been born.

Whenever I get stuck lately, I’ll make a robot for my son. (Here’s another one.) Just a silly little something. And when I give it to him, I remember that, sure, the gift is in the giving, but the gift is really in the making.

Making something for somebody — is there anything simpler and more likely to get one unstuck?

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