Austin Kleon

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…

10 good books I read this summer

Here are 10 books that helped me through the long summer, listed in the order I read them:

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
Larry McMurtry

“Let those who are free of Texas enjoy their freedom.” McMurtry’s first book of essays, published in 1968, after his novel, The Last Picture Show. Belongs on the shelf next to Wright’s God Save Texas and other great books about this insane state I happen to live in. (Related reading: The Pirate Gardener.)

 

Smile: The Story of a Face
Sarah Ruhl

“Imperfection is a portal. Whereas perfection and symmetry create distance… imperfection and the messy particular had the power to open the heart.” I loved Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write, so I was delighted to read an advance copy of her memoir, which comes out next month. A playwright, McArthur “Genius,” and mother of 3, she writes beautifully about the intertwining of her art and everyday life.

 

Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles
Rosecrans Baldwin

“Less of a city than a country. Less of a community than a climate. Less of a metropolis than an eighty-eight-city nation-state.” I picked this up because I am fascinated by all things Los Angeles. (I try to get out there to see my friends at least once a year, but it’s been over two years since I’ve seen the Pacific!) LA is one of those cities that everybody has an image of, but I really had to have it explained to me before I could get my head around it…

 

Cyclopedia Exotica
Aminder Dhaliwal

As an almost-lifelong four-eyes, I love thinking about vision and I love comic stories that take full advantage of the medium, so Dhaliwal’s book about a world in which Cyclopes are a minority group was right up my alley. “I remember saying to a friend, I want to do a book on microaggressions, but that’s, like, so old. Is it even worth doing?” Dhaliwal said in this profile. Lucky for us, she kept going.

 

Several Short Sentences About Writing
Verlyn Klinkenborg

“Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization,” Klinkenborg writes. “Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important? It will have to be you.” This is simply one of the best books about writing I’ve ever read. Up there with Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and other classics. (Related reading: “The most important thing you do.”)

 

Walkman
Michael Robbins

Great cover. I read this poetry collection one poem at a time, one poem per meal:

“I wish I had a shed out back…
I don’t mean
some romantic Unabomber
shit, just a shed.”

Big same!

 

Prince and the Parade and Sign O’ The Times Era Studio Sessions: 1985 and 1986
Duane Tudahl

I am a recording nerd who grew up obsessing over books about The Beatles’ recording sessions, so I tore through the official the Prince archivist’s second volume chronicling the Purple One’s unbelievable output at what was arguably the height of his powers. (Read along with this Spotify playlist!) Tudahl’s volume about the Purple Rain sessions inspired another playlist and made my favorite reads of 2018. I will read as many of these as he puts together.

 

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness
Kristen Radtke

These can be lonely times, and this was the right book at the right time for me. Somewhat unclassifiable — my favorite kind of book! —  it’s not a traditional comic in panels, but more a kind of illustrated nonfiction essay. Made me want to re-read Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and pick up Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. I’m now a big fan of Radtke’s work, and I look forward to reading her first book, Imagine Wanting Only This.

 

Jess: O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica

I’d known about Jess’s work for years, but never really spent much time getting to know it in detail. This is a gorgeously-produced collection of the San Francisco collage artist’s work — the fold-out poster and extra booklet reminded me of some of Chris Ware’s book design. Other books about the artist I picked up: Jess: To and From the Printed Page and An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle.

 

Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light
Leonard Shlain

Alain de Botton once said that the least interesting thing about religion is whether it’s true or not, and I feel that way about Shlain’s thesis that great artists anticipated leaps in physics — sometimes by several centuries. What is thrilling to me as a reader is to watch a sharp mind work through the history of these two fields and juxtapose their developments. (There’s a nice afterword in new editions about how the surgeon came to be a writer.)

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