Austin Kleon

Nouns and verbs

“When you’re writing a song, nouns and verbs will carry you right through.”
—Chuck Berry

The first exercise in Jeff Tweedy’s How To Write One Song is called a “Word Ladder.” (Not Lewis Carroll’s word game.) It goes like this:

  1. Make a list of ten verbs related to some profession. (He uses a physician, I used a construction worker.)
  2. Write down ten nouns within your field of vision.
  3. Connect the words that don’t usually go together.

Here’s how it worked when I tried it:

Nothing that great, but that’s not the point. The point is to loosen up and play with language to get your brain going. Tweedy writes:

“I like to use this exercise not so much to generate a set of lyrics but to remind myself of how much fun I can have with words when I’m not concerning myself with meaning or judging my poetic abilities…. I find it almost always works when I’m feeling a need to break out of my normal, well-worn paths of language.”

“Nouns and verbs” is also the really basic advice I give to people who are trying out blackout poetry for the first time.

For example, here’s one I started by just underlining nouns and verbs that popped out at me:

And that led to this:

And seeing that, I realized with a little Photoshop cheat (is it cheating if there ain’t no rules?) I could “fix” it to this:

Not my best work, but, again, not the point. Plus, it only took me 10-15 minutes. (By the way, exercise #2 in Tweedy’s book is called “Stealing Words From A Book.” Stealing has, of course, always worked for me!) Give it a try next time you’re stuck.

Nouns and verbs, y’all. They’ll take you right through.

Related reading: “A bag of words” & “We are verbs, not nouns”

The Vampire Test

Here’s an animated excerpt from my audiobook about a test that will tell you who and what you should let in and out of your life. (Also on Instagram.)

It may be easier or harder to practice during a pandemic, depending on your situation. (I often joke in talks, “Children don’t count. Their job is to suck you dry.”)

I got the idea for the test from a story in John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3). Brancusi, who’d had several of his sculptural ideas ripped off from Pablo, “was anything but an admirer of Picasso or his work”:

[He] disapproved of [one of] of Picasso’s fundamental characteristics—one that was all too familiar to the latter’s fellow artists and friends—his habit of making off not so much with their ideas as with their energy. “Picasso is a cannibal,” Brancusi said. He had a point. After a pleasurable day in Picasso’s company, those present were apt to end up suffering from collective nervous exhaustion. Picasso had made off with their energy and would go off to his studio and spend all night living off it. Brancusi hailed from vampire country and knew about such things, and he was not going to have his energy or the fruits of his energy appropriated by Picasso.

I also cribbed a little from this Lynda Barry interview:

My friend Frank Chimero pointed out this is also #3 on Milton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work,  “SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.”

[T]here is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energized or less energized. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

What’s really funny is that the book came out in 2014, way before the What We Do In The Shadows show, which features one of my all-time favorite characters, Colin Robinson, a self-proclaimed “energy vampire”:

You gotta look out for these people. Once you start noticing them… they’re everywhere!

Related reading: Human vantablack, finding nourishment vs. identifying poison

Morning pages (and variations)

“Of all the self-help tools I’ve tested through the years,” Oliver Burkeman (author of The Antidote) writes in his latest issue of The Imperfectionist, “one has proved more enduring than the rest: Morning Pages.”

Julia Cameron writes about morning pages in The Artist’s Way and her shorter spin-off, The Miracle of Morning Pages. She says:

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. *There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages*– they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.

Schoolhouse Rock (and De La Soul) taught us: 3 is a Magic Number.

Somewhere in the ancient mystic trinity
You get three as a magic number
The past and the present and the future
The faith and hope and charity
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number

Is this some Hippie Shit? Yes. But, as Oliver notes, it is Hippie Shit that seems to work!

I do three pages minimum in my diary every morning. It’s not exactly freewriting, more old-fashioned diary, mixed with the occasional comics and diagrams.

My method is cribbed from The Sedaris Method: write things down all day in a pocket notebook, then wake up the next morning, fill out my logbook, and then write longhand about yesterday.

When I don’t know what to write about I answer “The Best Thing” prompt or draw until I feel like writing.  (This morning I wrote about banana bread and palm trees.)

I often do some combination of mind-mapping or what Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction calls “clustering”: starting in the middle of a page, writing a word, putting a box or circle around it, then writing another word, etc., until I have a tree or web. (Maps are magic, too.)

I do this very slowly, and let one thing sort of lead into the other. It’s like emptying out the junk in your brain. The reason I sometimes prefer it to straight prose on notebook paper is that you can more easily see the connections between all the weird crap on your mind. (There’s a blank “mind map” in The Steal Like An Artist Journal.)

I recently found out that the director Harmony Korine does a deranged version of this kind of non-linear map-writing to come up with ideas for his films. Watch the video above (if you dare) to see it in action.

David Byrne, “A History of Mark-Making, ” 2002

In David Byrne’s book of tree drawings, Arboretum, he writes that diagrams like these are “an eclectic blend” of:

…faux science, automatic writing, satire, and an attempt to find connections where none were thought to exist — a sort of self-therapy, allowing the hand to say what the voice cannot. Irrational logic, it’s sometimes called. The application of logical scientific rigor and form to basically irrational premises. To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense. The world keeps opening up, unfolding, and just when we expect it to be closed — to be a sealed, sensible box — it shows us something completely surprising.

Emphasis mine. (See: “The value of nonsense.”)

“There’s a general attitude here that’s well worth cultivating,” Oliver writes, “a healthy scepticism toward the part of your brain that’s so enthusiastic about controlling how things unfold. You just do the pages, and something else does the rest.”

Here, I think, is something else valuable to be uncovered from the morning pages: just as you let go and let the pages unfold, in some small way, you’re also training yourself to let your day unfold. To, hopefully, be as improvisational and playful in filling your day as you were about filling your notebook.

Pieces of mail

It’s bad enough I can’t write back to everyone who writes me, but I feel really weird throwing out nice letters after I read them, so sometimes I’ll open my diary and paste little bits from each piece of mail I read as I go.

Blexbolex’s Ballad

If you’re lucky, the overlap in the Venn diagram of books you love to read and books your kids love to read is more than a sliver.

Blexbolex’s Ballad is a mysterious little book. Starting with a simple, 3-page chapter about a child who walks home from school (“The school, the road, home.”) the second chapter adds a page in between each previous page (“The school, the street, the road, the forest, home.”) and the author continues that pattern for 7 chapters, eventually culminating in a story of over 50 pages.

There’s a wonderful post over at Picturebook Makers where Blexbolex talks about his process:

The trigger of the form was firstly my stay with a group of artists working on comics in an unconventional way: OuBaPo. One of the exercises captured my imagination. It involved inserting one square of a comic strip between two existing squares, thereby diverting the narrative ellipsis towards another one. Then a meeting with a group of children gave me the real key to the book. They were playing a game where whatever path they took, they always got to arrive home.
a diagram of the book’s structure by Blexbolex

 

Blexbolex’s thumbnail sketches

The OuLiPo-inspired hijinx would be impressive on their own, but what’s truly amazing to me is that for a book that feels so analog and textured, almost all of the artwork was done digitally:

The images for the book are purely digital. Only three backgrounds on paper (two with pencil and one with ink wash painting) were scanned in to allow me to add substance to the shapes drawn on the computer.

This process makes the book something that feels both ancient and futuristic, or rather, simply out-of-time.

This post is the first in a new Bookshelf series in which I’ll be sharing one of my favorite books every Saturday.

Art is an early warning system

“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”
—Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

Here’s a deck of cards McLuhan released six years before Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies. Many of them haven’t aged particularly well, but they’re interesting as a historical curiosity. A few of my favorites:

See also: my card games

How to break in a Sharpie

I signed hundreds of copies of my books at Bookpeople in the past few weeks. Because of the pandemic, we sign masked and socially distanced on the picnic tables outside:

This cart is probably, oh, 1/3 of what I signed for the holidays:

As you can imagine, I go through a lot of Sharpies. Because I’m a weirdo, I have a technique to break in new ones, which I demonstrate in this video (also on Instagram):

Happy huffing drawing.

A piano in the home

My piano. (A 1983 Yamaha U1 — same vintage as me.)

“We had everything we needed. We had piano, guitar, ukuleles, every type of everything. That was what was great about the way we grew up. It really makes a difference to have a piano in the home. I feel like everybody, even if you don’t play the piano, you should have a piano. Every time I go into a house and it doesn’t have a piano, I’m like, what are you doing?”
—Billie Eilish

Before my first son was born, I went out and bought a piano for the house. It was really important to me that he grow up with a piece of furniture he could walk over to and play his feelings on.

a drawing by Mariah Carey

Here’s that piano, an old Lowrey I got in San Marcos for about the price of a flat screen TV:

Here’s a video of me playing it with Owen on my lap when he was 5 months old:

When he was about 6 months old, we found out that if I held down the sustain pedal and he played the black keys, it sounded like a Brian Eno ambient piece:

Here’s a photo of him as a toddler, looking inside the piano:

Here’s a video of me trying to show him how you can pluck the strings of a piano like a guitar:

We had that piano for the first six years of his life, and then we moved cross-country, and I gave it away. I regretted it immediately, and we spent two years without a real piano in the house.

But now, things are as they should be:

The most important piece of furniture in the house…

There is no finish line

“The pandemic is a marathon without a finish line.” In an article about what teleoanticipation (“teleo,” from the Greek, meaning end, goal, or purpose) can teach us about these COVID days, Alex Hutchinson writes:

It turns out that, if you ask yourself “Can I keep going?” rather than “Can I make it to the finish?” you’re far more likely to answer in the affirmative.

There’s a crazy marathon called Big Dog’s Outdoor Ultra, which is a four-mile loop that runners run until everyone else drops out. In a piece called, fittingly, “A Loop Eternal,” one of the champions, Guillaume Calmettes, said it was actually easier for him to run than a normal marathon:

“Because there is no predefined finish, you cannot think in terms of ‘how many miles do I have left before this thing is all over’, so in fact, I found it very easy mentally. I just had to think about the next loop. The next loop, always the next loop, it’s very easy thinking. You’re never overwhelmed by what you have left to run, because you simply don’t know what you have left to run.”

The Creative Learning Spiral

It’s a little spooky how much this squares with what I wrote in Keep Going about the creative life:

The creative life is not linear. It’s not a straight line from point A to point B. It’s more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. No matter how successful you get, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really “arrive.” Other than death, there is no finish line or retirement for the creative person.

Forget about the finish line. Do this loop. Then do another. Keep going.

Keep Going is now available as an audiobook.

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