Austin Kleon

You can’t create under surveillance

The biggest misinterpretation of Show Your Work! is the idea that you should show everyone everything all the time. Just set up a 24/7 webcam over your desk and let people watch. (I won’t name any names, but when the book was still being written, the title Expose Yourself was thrown out there.)

Not only do I think it’s a bad idea to share while you’re actually doing your work, I think it’s a fast track to destroying your work.

It’s nearly impossible — not to mention extremely unpleasant — to work with people looking over your shoulder. There’s “the indignity of being observed,” but there’s also the observer effect: the idea in quantum mechanics that by simply observing a system, you change it. (This happens all the time in my everyday life: I’ll spook a bird by trying to take a photo, or I’ll praise an in-progress drawing and the kid will run out of the room.)

A few years ago, Tim Kreider wrote of becoming a meme:

You can’t write — or live — if you imagine the whole world watching over your shoulder, waiting for you to screw up, ready to mock or vilify you. Which, thanks to the internet, it now is.

I thought of Tim when I read this recent interview with with Dave Eggers, about his new book, The Every:

My theory is that a human under surveillance can’t create. Not really, at least. The staff at the Every are judged on every movement, every keystroke and each thing their pupils land on. It’s all observed and recorded and measured, and this creates a low-level vibration of paralysis for everyone, for fear of saying the wrong thing or making any kind of mistake that will never be expunged. But to create, you have to tap into the anarchist part of yourself; there can’t be rules and there can’t be anyone looking over your shoulder, and you can’t wonder what a troll in Tallinn will think of your idea.

It’s bad enough trying to create something when nobody’s watching — the worst trolls are the ones that live in your head!

The danger of sharing online is this ambient buildup of a feeling of being surveilled.

The feeling of being watched, or about to be watched.

You have to disconnect from that long enough to connect with yourself and what you’re working on.

“To me, being a genuine writer means that you’re able to shed all human dignity in a moment,” says Chuck Palahniuk. “People depend on you to express something that they can’t express.”

Don’t be afraid to disappear.

Hide and seek.

Input as collage

In Edgar Wright’s outstanding film The Sparks Brothers, Stephen Morris, the drummer in Joy Division, says they were listening to two records on repeat when they recorded “Love Will Tear Us Apart”: an LP of Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits and Sparks’ No. 1 in Heaven.

My first reaction was “Whoa!” But the more I think about it, the more the mashup makes sense: isolate the vocal of “Strangers in the Night” and put it over the backing track of “La Dolce Vita.”

Your output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: you’re interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work.

Lately I’ve been thinking about being more intentional with input. Thinking about input as collage. Taking the principle of juxtaposition (1+1=3) and using that to guide your input: what weird, seemingly disparate things can you feed your brain that will come out later in a new mix?

The input collage can be subject or genre based and even better if it’s multi-media. (For example, reading art books and physics books at the same time, or watching a lot of westerns and kung fu movies at the same time or looking at paintings in a museum while reading physics papers while watching kung fu movies, etc.)

There’s a balance here between feeding your brain intentionally and then backing off and letting your brain do the subconscious work of mixing your inputs together.

In Art & Physics, the writer and surgeon Leonard Shlain wrote about his interesting method of “self-education” in the books’ subject matters:

Serendipitously, I discovered a way to heighten my creativity. My habit was to read a popular physics book late at night until the snooze gremlin nudged me with the signal that it was time to call it a day. Prior to falling asleep the following night, my mind relatively empty, I leafed through art books. The next morning, I would often connect images I had seen the night before with concepts in physics contained in my previous night’s reading. Something mysterious happens in the creative process during dreamtime, and I am an avid proponent of the school that advocates, “sleeping on it.”

It’s been pointed out before that dreams and collage work in the same kind of holistic, non-logical, non-linear manner. I love the idea of our brains gluing together the bits while we slumber…

A blessed unrest

A story about meeting choreographer Martha Graham for a soda, as told by Agnes de Mille in Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham:

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”

“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”

“No artist is pleased.”

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Creative maladjustment. Perpetually blessed and dissed, etc.

(Emphasis mine. Found via The Book Haven, copied from Brain Pickings.)

A tingle in the scalp

How do we know when we have something?

* * *

Of his recording work on Thriller, Quincy Jones says, “We simply did what gave us the goosebumps.”

* * *

“Goosebumps are the result of tiny muscles flexing in the skin, making hair follicles rise up a bit. This causes hairs to stand up. Goosebumps are an involuntary reaction: nerves from the sympathetic nervous system — the nerves that control the fight or flight response — control these skin muscles.”

* * *

“Frisson (French for ‘shiver’), also known as aesthetic chills or musical chills is a psychophysiological response to rewarding auditory and/or visual stimuli that often induces a pleasurable or otherwise positively-valenced affective state and transient paresthesia (skin tingling or chills), sometimes along with piloerection (goose bumps) and mydriasis (pupil dilation).”

* * *

“All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and purt science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

* * *

“The tipoff for me is somatic. Whenever a project comes to me, one that is right, that is genuine, I feel a kind of ‘shiver’ in my body, and that tells me that it corresponds to something very deep in me, and that I need to pursue it. That has been my guide with literally every book I wrote. Trusting this kind of visceral reaction means that you are willing to let life ‘come and get you.’ It means who you are is defined from the inside, not the outside. In terms of what’s really important, we don’t have much choice, and that’s as it should be. The decision is made by a larger energy or unconscious process, and when it’s right, you know it… Goethe wrote: ‘Man errs as long as he strives.’ Sit still, meditate, just let the answer arise from the body. (It may take a while.)”
—Morris Berman

* * *

“‘Oh, yes, father,’ he said. ‘I’d like to earn a living, I really would. I’d love to learn how to get the shivers. That’s something I don’t understand at all.’ […]

The father could only sigh. ‘Well, it won’t do you any harm to find out about the shivers,’ he said, ‘but you won’t get a living by shivering.’”
—Philip Pullman, “The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About The Shivers,” Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm

* * *

“When I make a connection between two disparate subjects, I can almost feel my scalp tingle. I imagine the dendrites in my brain reaching out to make new connections to old knowledge. To me, setting my scalp atingle is one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing…”
—Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics

* * *

I’m waiting for that tingle in the scalp.

The Four Energies

When reading Jane Friedman’s newsletter, I came across this great bit by writer Bill O’Hanlon, from his book, Becoming A Published Therapist:

In my view, there are four main energies you can tap into when you write your book. The main writing energy you discover may be just one or you may find that you have a combination of more than one of these energies that fuels your writing endeavors. The four energies are Blissed, Blessed, Pissed, and Dissed. The first two represent the positive energies; the last two, the “negative.”

The energies are split between “what you love and what upsets you”:

  • “Blissed” energy comes from what you’re on fire for and can’t stop doing.
  • “Blessed” means you’ve been gifted something that you feel compelled to share.
  • “Pissed” means you’re pissed off or angry about something.
  • “Dissed” means you feel “dissatisfied or disrespected.”

O’Hanlon goes on to say many of his early books were “written from a combination of pissed and blissed.”

(I can relate: much of my work comes from being a combination of angry and curious.)

O’Hanlon’s point is that ideas aren’t enough, you need energy to see you through a creative project, and if you can identify that energy and where it comes from, it can help your work.

Rewinding your attention

In “less search, more feed” style, Clive Thompson recently wrote about “rewilding your attention,” or avoiding what the algorithm is trying to push at you:

My phone keeps trying to autocorrect “rewilding” to “rewinding,” and I’m choosing to take it as a sign: rewinding can be a kind rewilding.

Rewinding your attention, for many of us who grew up in the wilder days of the web, means going back to older ways of attending. (Clive’s solution is also the solution of Rob Walker and some of my other more interesting friends: cultivate weird RSS feeds in Feedly. And read weird books.)

For me, it also means going back to my beginnings, remembering the weird interests that brought me to my work, re-discovering and maybe re-investing in those interests, and sharing them in the way that has brought me so much…

Update: Clive has dropped a list of 9 ways to rewild your attention!

An act of perpetual self-authorization

“Nothing in your education has taught you that what you notice is important,” writes Verlyn Klinkenborg in Several Short Sentences About Writing.

But everything you notice is important.
Let me say that a different way:
If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.
But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,
And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice
In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.

Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?
It will have to be you.
The authority you feel has a great deal to do with how you write, and what you write,
With your ability to pay attention to the shape and meaning of your own thoughts
And the value of your own perceptions.

Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorize yourself….
No one else can authorize you.
No one.

“This doesn’t happen overnight,” he writes. So how does one begin?

Start by learning to recognize what interests you.
Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter,
So they never learn how to notice,
Not even what interests them.
Or they assume that the world has been completely pre-noticed,
Already sifted and sorted and categorized
By everyone else, by people with real authority.
And so they write about pre-authorized subjects in pre-authorized language.

I have copied this passage out several times now, because it’s one of the best things I’ve ever read about giving yourself permission to write, to draw, to do anything creative.

Here is a nice, long interview with Klinkenborg in which he discusses the book’s origin and his teaching.

“What I do now is essentially help students escape from their education,” he says.

They’re taught that what they notice is not important. That the things they pay attention to really don’t matter, because they’re going to be taught how to handle what other people notice, what other people have written, what other people would have said. Well, what if you say to a student, “No actually, what you notice is important and it’s important because you noticed it.” What if you pay attention to the pattern of the way you notice the world around you? What if you pay attention to the perceptions that you have and the character of them, and trust their validity?

I cannot recommend the book enough. One of my favorite reads of the year.

If a book can be summarized, is it worth reading?

There is a wonderful 2012 interview with Iain McGilchrist in which he talks about leaving his life as an Oxford literary scholar to become a psychiatrist:

I love literature very much and I found that a lot of the things that I could see were very valuable were very hard to convey once one started taking the thing apart… It seemed to me that people who make works of art, whatever they might be, have gone to great trouble to make something unique which is embodied in the form that it is and not in any other form and that it transmits things that remain implicit.  If you explain a joke, you lose a power of it.  If you have to explain a poem you’re going to lose a bit of the power of that too.  It struck me that there was two or three rather important philosophical points about a work of art, that first of all what it conveyed needed to remain implicit and when you stuck something, yanked it out of context, and stuck it into the middle of the spotlight of attention you actually changed what it was because you hadn’t found out more about what was there in the first place.  It needed to be incarnate.  I mean, works of art are not just disembodied, entirely abstract, conceptual things.  They are embodied in the words they’re in or in paint or in stone or in musical notes or whatever it might be and much of that power and the fact that those things also affect us neurophysicologically.  When you read a poem it affects your heart rate, your breathing, you feel things in your bodily frame….

The longer I read, the more I believe that the value of a book, regardless of whether it’s fiction or nonfiction or comics or poetry, is actually in the experience of turning the pages, moving from one sentence to the next, or one panel to the other. How I feel, and what I think about, and where my attention goes. This experience continues throughout the days and nights in between my reading sessions, and, if the book is any good, continues after I have finished the book.

I have noticed a proliferation of book summaries online — blog posts or even whole apps dedicated to extracting the “key insights” from books, attempts to package up the whole by reducing it down to its essentials, its main points. On the one hand, this is nothing new (see: CliffsNotes), but on the other, I think it signals the popularity of a way of reading in which books are mined for nutrients, takeaways, big ideas, etc. In this mode, books — especially nonfiction — are simply containers of “content” that can be packaged in whatever form you like.

It is my opinion that if a book’s contents can be adequately “summed up,” so that you really don’t miss anything by reading the summary, it is not actually a book worth reading. (Of course, there’s no way to tell whether a summary is adequate or not unless you have also read the book.) Also, I suspect that the harder you find it to summarize a book you have read, the more valuable it might be.

The tricky thing here is that the more summarizable the book, the easier it is to market and sell. A book proposal, for example, is simply a summary of a book that doesn’t exist yet. It is the marketing copy before the product is born.

I blame a great deal of the boring books in the world on the very process by which they are published: a summary is presented, it is purchased, the book is written, and if the final book sticks to the summary, everybody is happy.

Now, I used to be a copywriter, so I’m trained to invent summaries. It is very tempting, when I am beginning to work on a book, to start thinking in this summary form: to try to see the “big picture” and the “key ideas” in abstract first.

This is the sensible, professional way of working, but for me it is a kind of creative death, antithetical to the reason I write in the first place: to discover what I know, or discover what I don’t want to know, to invent something on the page that couldn’t exist unless I went to the page to have an experience in the first place.

To put it another way: If a book can be summarized, is it worth writing?

Maybe there’s a third path here. Maybe it’s possible to write something that is easily summarized but impossible to sum up…

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