Austin Kleon

You have to really love your idea

A page from my book, Keep Going

I saw a clip of writer Robert Greene talking about creative work that really rang true:

“You have to really love your idea. It has to be something from deep within. It has to be personal. It has to excite you on a deep level. Because you’re going to have to persevere for several years. There are going to be a lot of critics, a lot of mean-spirited people are gonna say, ‘You can never do that!’

When you create anything, the spirit you create it with, the energy, the excitement, is translated into the product itself. So when somebody writes a book just for money, you can kind of smell it. When you read the book, it kind of reeks. We can sense that. But when the writer is excited, it excites the reader. So the love and the desire you put into your project will translate.”

3 additional thoughts on this:

1) I would worry less about mean-spirited people, and worry more about well-intentioned people. The mean-spirited you can ignore pretty easily, but the well-intentioned can actually do much more damage, because you really care what they have to say. This includes agents, editors, friends, colleagues, loved ones, etc.

2) Not only will you have to persevere for many years, if your wildest dreams come true and your project is a huge hit, you have to be ready to talk for years — if not decades! — about it. So at the very least, it better be something you were passionate about at the time of its making.

3) I truly believe that great books are sort of crystallizations of the energy of writer at a certain moment in time and magic happens when the reader’s energy and the writer’s energy sort of unlock each other. (I wrote a little more bit about this in the afterword to Steal — you put all the energy in as the writer, but it’s really the reader’s energy that completes the circuit.)

On preaching to the choir

Maybe because I grew up singing in the church choir, I think a lot about that phrase, “Preaching to the choir.”

The funny thing is that the choir needs preaching, too.

And, for that matter, so does the preacher.

And it turns out that Rebecca Solnit wrote a whole essay on “Preaching To The Choir”:

[T]o suggest that you shouldn’t preach to the choir is to misunderstand the nature of preaching. Conversion or the transmission of new information is not the primary aim; the preacher has other work to do. Classically, the sermon is a kind of literary criticism that regards the key sacred texts and their meanings as inexhaustible. Adults, like children, love hearing the great stories more than once, and most religions have prayers and narratives, hymns and songs that are seen as wells of meaning that never run dry. You can go lay down your sword and shield by the riverside one more time; there are always more ways to say how once you were blind and now can see.

Or, this line, which a reader sent me: “We preach to the choir so they’ll sing.”

Dandelions and orchids

Here’s a wonderful sign I saw in a front yard while walking my neighborhood. This is exactly how I feel when I’m tossing out seeds at the beginning of a creative project: Are these weeds or are they flowers? I guess we’ll see. 

But what is a weed? Emerson, ever a fan of a gardening metaphor, said it was “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”

I came across another gardening metaphor just this morning: dandelions and orchids.

This metaphor comes from psychology and has to do with sensitivity in children. The idea is that some children are like dandelions and they can grow in any environment. Other children are like orchids: they need very particular conditions and the right environment to grow and thrive.  And a majority of children are like tulips, somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.

The metaphor, like all metaphors, has limits, but I find it personally helpful: I’m raising one boy who’s more like a dandelion and one who’s more like an orchid.

Artists tend to be highly sensitive people, and I wonder how many grown artists consider themselves dandelions or orchids.

I feel like a dandelion, myself, which is good and bad. So often, I feel scattered to the winds, content to land wherever, and do my work there. I am easily distracted and can get interested in anything. Chaos can be a very fruitful source of creativity for me.

But there are orchid parts of me that I feel are really beautiful and often neglected — in part because I pride myself on my unfussy dandelion-ness.

I suspect this has some relationship to the specialist/farmer and generalist/hunter tension.

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