Madeleine Dore interviewed me for her site Extraordinary Routines:
With his daily life currently in flux while on a two month tour for his latest book, Keep Going, writer and artist Austin Kleon has been thinking about how to create a portable version of his routine.
“I think routine is so important, especially when you’re getting started creatively, but for me right now, I almost need checkboxes and rituals more than I need routine.”
Currently, the daily checkboxes include writing in his diary, publishing a blog post, taking a walk, and reading a book.
Such a sequence has been influenced by the ‘the two Davids’ – Henry David Thoreau and David Sedaris, who essentially share the same approach to the writing process. That is, spending a large majority of their day walking. “Thoreau took these insanely long four to eight hour walks and then he would come back and write about them. Sedaris will wake up in the morning and will write in his diary for a couple of hours about the day before. Then he walks and picks up trash on the street for seven or eight hours a day.”
This repeatable process of collecting ideas, recording them in a diary, and then turning findings into public lectures and books is something Austin has duplicated in his own way. “I always keep a pocket notebook on me, and then I diary in the morning, and then create a blog post, and those blog posts will become talks, which then become books. You don’t have to worry about what to write about, you just write every day and things begin to develop.”
Whether in the form of checkboxes or a routine, this process makes the morning hours crucial to his creativity. “The most important thing for me to do is to write my diary and to write a blog post. If I have done that, then the day in some ways is a success.”
Read the rest of our interview here.
The days stack up
My logbooks and my diaries from the past couple of years.
How writer Kio Stark keeps going
My friend Kio Stark, author of the books Don’t Go Back To School and When Strangers Meet, sent me a message yesterday and I asked her if I could share it here. (Maybe we’ll make this a regular thing? We’ll see.) Here’s what she said:
I just wrote a new strangers newsletter, and not having sent one in 6 months, I realized that writing it is one of my best “keep going” strategies. It’s small and doable, and reminds me that I am good at writing. Because it’s about documenting interactions with strangers, it also pushes me to pay more attention when I’m out in public with other humans.
It started as a blog in 2009 — they were very short back then — as a way to keep in touch with my writing self while I had a day job. I used to write them on my lunch hour. They were maybe 100-150 words tops. The newsletter ones now are longer because I don’t have a day job anymore…
Kio told me that a lot of those short pieces on her blog eventually made it into her novel, Follow Me Down. (A very Show Your Work! type of case study.)
You can watch her TED talk and subscribe to her newsletter here.
How to read more
“I always read a lot. I read the same amount, no matter what season it is. I read every night. When I’m on book tour, I’m on airplanes all the time, so I’m always reading. People say, ‘How do you have time to read?’ Oh, come on, it’s simple! You’re single and you don’t watch television.”
—John Waters
“How do you make time for that?” can almost always be answered with, “I make time for that.”
Still, here are 5 things that have helped me read more, and might help you, too:
1. Quit reading books you don’t like.
“I believe that the phrase ‘obligatory reading’ is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory… If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old…. If a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.”
—Jorge Luis Borges“Nobody is going to get any points in heaven by slogging their way through a book they aren’t enjoying but think they ought to read.”
—Nancy Pearl“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
—Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
If you aren’t getting anything out of a book, put it down, and pick up another book.
Every hour you spend inching through a boring book is an hour you could’ve spent plowing through a brilliant one.
When it comes to books, quitters finish more.
Sometimes a book just isn’t for you, or it’s not for you yet.
It helps if you choose the right books in the first place. Stop reading what you think you should be reading and just read what you genuinely want to read. Read what you love and read at whim.
2. Carry a book with you at all times.
“Because I was carrying the book around all the time, I pulled it out all the time: On the subway, walking down the block to get groceries…”
—Clive Thompson, “Reading War and Peace on my iPhone”
Get used to carrying a book around with you wherever you go and reaching for it in all the spare moments you’d usually pull out your phone. (Commutes, lunch breaks, grocery store lines, etc.)
Go to bed early and bring your book with you. If you fall asleep while reading, pick it back up when you wake and read for a bit before you get out of bed.
Always have a book queued next in line for when you finish the current book you’re reading.
Feel free to read promiscuously — date 3 or 4 books at the same time until one makes you want to settle down with it.
I am partial to carrying paper books and reading with a pencil, but I also love my e-reader, and a smartphone is undeniably handy, if you can avoid social media and the internet.
Which brings us to our next point.
3. Keep your phone in airplane mode.
“Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.”
—Mary Karr
A big part of reading is visiting other worlds, and you can’t visit another world if you’re constantly distracted by this one.
If you’re gonna read on your phone, switch it into airplane mode so you’re not even tempted to go online.
When you sit down to read a paper book, either put your phone in airplane mode, or plug your phone in across the room so you’re not tempted to reach for it.
Get a paper dictionary, so when you read at home or in the office, you don’t have to pull out your phone to look up words.
4. Make regular trips to your local library and/or bookstore.
“You must go to the library and fall in love.”
—Ray Bradbury
I find a lot of great books through friends and online and through my own reading, but there’s nothing quite like the “serendipity of the stacks,” the magical discoveries that often happen when you’re browsing in a library or a bookstore.
If distraction is terrible for book reading, it’s great for book discovering. You never know what you’ll bump into in the stacks. You go hunting for a book and you find an even better book shelved a few books down from it.
I frequent the “New” and “Recently Returned” shelves at my local library and sometimes I’ll even snoop to see what people have on hold on the reserve shelves.
Nothing beats a well-curated selection in a great indie bookstore. It’s glorious to spend an afternoon shopping at Bookpeople or Powell’s or The Strand or any number of the great stores I’ve had the pleasure to visit on book tour.
5. Share books you love with others. (They’ll give you more books to read.)
“Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.”
—Neil Gaiman
Keep track of what you read, whether it’s in a private notebook or on a site like Goodreads. (Take inspiration from Art Garfunkel, who has a list of every book he’s read since 1968.)
Share the books you love in whatever way you can. (Every week, I share what I’m reading in my weekly newsletter, and every year, I make a list of my favorite reads.)
The great thing about sharing your favorite books is that you meet other people who love those books, and they’ll share with you even more books to love.
Take notes, and let the books stack up. Gigantic book piles aren’t a sign you’re doing it wrong, they’re a sign that you’re doing it right.
* * *
If you need something to read, check out my newest book, Keep Going.
You’ve got to be kind
Whenever someone I know has a new baby, I re-read this part of Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:
In this short video James Martin, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, suggests that rather than giving up something for Lent, we try instead to do something active and positive: “Be kind.”
His tips:
1) Don’t be a jerk.
2) Honor the absent.
3) Always give people the benefit of the doubt.
The video made me think of George Saunders’ wonderful commencement speech, Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, in which he says, “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” He suggests a worthy goal in life is to “Try to be kinder.” How?
Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition — recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us.
He also says the good news is that we tend to get kinder as we get older: “as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.”
When Roger Ebert was at the peak of his blogging in 2009, death on his mind, he wrote a post about his beliefs, and wrote about kindness:
I drank for many years in a tavern that had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:
“I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals.I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.”
For 57 words, that does a pretty good job of summing it up.
“Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
Why is being kind so hard? From a review of On Kindness, by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor:
The punch line of the book is that we are, each of us, battling back against our innate kindness, with which we are fairly bursting, at every turn. Why? Because “real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can. . . . By involving us with strangers . . . as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality.” By walling ourselves off from our inner kindness, we end up skulking around, hoarding scraps from the lost magical kindness of childhood, terrified that our hatred is stronger than our love.
As with so many things in life, it helps to think of kindness as a verb (something you do) and not a noun (something you have). Here’s Emily Esfahani Smith:
There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise.
I suspect that one way to be kinder to others is to be kinder to yourself. Being kind to yourself isn’t just about saying affirmations in the mirror or whatever. It’s, for example, giving yourself time to be completely absorbed in something. I love this post by Liz Danzico about playing music:
Learning to play music is an long exercise learning to be kind to yourself. As your fingers stumble to keep up with your eyes and ears, your brain will say unkind things to the rest of you. And when this tangle of body and mind finally makes sense of a measure or a melody, there is peace. Or, more accurately, harmony. And like the parents who so energetically both fill a house with music and seek its quietude, both are needed to make things work. As with music, it takes a lifetime of practice to be kind to yourself. Make space for that practice, and the harmony will emerge.
I don’t know how to end this, so here’s a couple lines from W.H. Auden’s “Moon Landing,” collected in Selected Poems:
We were always adroiter / with objects than lives, and more facile / at courage than kindness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymDPQodemU4
And here’s Philip Larkin, from “The Mower”:
…we should be carefulOf each other, we should be kindWhile there is still time.
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