A blog post is a search query to find your people

Sunday, February 19, 2023

when you pin your kind you get your team — A blackout from my book, *Show Your Work!*

I loved Henrik Karlsson’s piece, “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”

He writes:

A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people. It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.

So what do you write about to find your people?

You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.

If you do this, Karlsson says, “You will write essays that almost no one likes…. Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.”

This is really a great summary of the best thing that writing and sharing your work can do for you.

Henry Miller quote — A page from *Show Your Work!*

Pointing at things

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

John Baldessari, *Commissioned Painting: A Painting by William Bowne* (1969)

The story goes that the painter Al Held said, “Conceptual art is just pointing at things,” so John Baldessari decided to take him literally, and commissioned a bunch of amateur painters to paint realistic paintings of hands pointing at things:

Of course, all art is, in a sense, pointing at things! The artist sees something and she points to it so you can see it, too.

Hedda Sterne, in an interview with Art in America, said she thought art was about, saying, “Hey, look!”

The intention, the purpose, is not to show your talent but to show something…. I had a very great urgency to show, to share. The cat brings you in things, you know? It was that kind of thing. I discovered things and wanted to share them.

Something similar from Corita Kent: “I just make things I like bigger.”

Sterne emphasized that she pointed away from herself. To Bomb magazine: “I see myself as a well-working lens, a perceiver of something that exists independently of me: don’t look at me, look at what I’ve found.”

It’s the same for writers: Good writing is often just pointing at things.

In his most recent newsletter, Oliver Burkeman suggests that people who want to make writing less hard should just think about showing people something that you’ve noticed. “Look, over there,” your writing should ask, “can you see?

“When you write,” says Steven Pinker, “you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation.”

“Which sounds obvious,” says Burkeman, “except that it makes immediately clear how many writers are doing something else.”

Academics are often more focused on showing off their knowledge, or their membership in an exclusive circle…. Journalists are often trying to inflame your anger, or rally support for some cause.

“The reader wants to see,” Burkeman says, “your job is to do the pointing.”

It is the same for blogging, says Robin Rendle: “blogging is pointing at things and falling in love.” (I like his ordering: not falling in love and then pointing, but pointing and then falling in love. Loving something by paying attention to it.)

As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,

“Step 1: Wonder at something.

Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.”

Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.

Blogging as a forgiving medium

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Artists speak of unforgiving mediums.

“Pastel is the unforgiving medium,” wrote Irving Petlin, in Notes on Pastel:

I am attracted to pastel as a medium because of the gamble involved in its execution. There is a fascination with the processes of control and risk enacted on a surface, a surface building toward the last plunges of color that bring everything already developed there into focus—the color bolt that finishes a picture.

I am on Twitter, still, despite my better judgment, and it seems to me to be The extremely unforgiving medium in my life.

It is risky compositionally. You can delete a tweet, but you can’t edit a tweet. You can add to a tweet, but it’s hard to improve upon it.

It is risky socially. Every tweet is an invitation for scrutiny if not consultation if not correction if not misunderstanding if not rancor. Forgiveness, even if we agreed it still existed in the wider culture, I think we could probably agree it doesn’t really exist on Twitter. (“Never Tweet” is not terrible advice.)

And yet, like Petlin, I think I am attracted to “the gamble involved” in the unforgiving medium’s execution. Sometimes it yields gold. Sometimes a tweet leads to the next good idea or a new friendship or mutual appreciation. Sometimes tweets become blog posts that become book chapters.

If Twitter is the unforgiving medium in my life, where are the forgiving mediums?

My notebooks would be one.

Even my published books, since they go through a long editorial process of people who care correcting me, and if there’s a typo, we can fix it in the next printing.

Another forgiving medium? Compared to Twitter, I’d make a case for blogging.

Blog posts can be edited, added to, improved upon.

If you missed something, you can fix it.

For example, a few days ago I posted about Nathaniel Russell’s fake fliers. One reader pointed out (on Twitter) that it wasn’t a tree in the poster, it was a utility pole.

Fixed!

Another reader pointed out (on Twitter) that there was an The Art Assignment video about Russell’s work.

Added!

The ability to “move it around for a long time” is what I’m looking for in a writing medium — I want words and images to be movable, I want to switch them out, copy and cut and paste them, let them mutate.

But most importantly, I want to be able to be wrong. I want to change my mind! I want to evolve.

Being wrong publicly is the easiest way to learn what you need to know. The trouble is: it’s also the easiest way to get yelled at or shamed or “canceled,” as they say.

To do the exploration that growth and change requires, one needs a forgiving medium… but what one really needs forgiving readers.

Every newsletter I send, for example, is a gamble. It can’t be edited, only issued a correction in the next one. But my readers, on the whole, tend to be a caring bunch. (If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t subscribe.) Corrections are often made privately, over email.

In the book Fare Forward, a collection of letters David Markson sent Laura Sims, Markson begs Sims not to send him any print-outs from the internet.

“HOW CAN PEOPLE LIVE IN THAT FIRST-DRAFT WORLD?”

Twitter, to me, is very much that “First-Draft World” that Markson bemoaned. But blogging feels to me like a world of endless drafting, endless revisioning.

A much more forgiving medium.

(I look forward to editing this post.)

15 years of blogging (and 3 reasons I keep going)

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Austin Kleon (@austinkleon)

Is it weird to start a post about blogging with a video of my paper diaries? All I want to do is make the point that I have made over and over and over again, on this blog and in my books:

The days stack up.

Here’s what I wrote five years ago:

One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work. This blog has been my sketchbook, my studio, my gallery, my storefront, and my salon. Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back in some way to this blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships—they all exist because I have my own little piece of turf on the Internet.

I started this blog when I was 22 years old. I’m 37 now. Good grief.

Why keep blogging? For me, there are at least 3 good reasons:

1. To leave a trace.

Here’s what William Kentridge says in Six Drawing Lessons about why he thinks he makes art:

An insufficiency in the self, the need to be a snail, leaving a trail of yourself as you move through the world. Hansel, leaving a trail of crumbs to lead you home.

On a single post of this blog you’ll find a form of navigation known as “bread crumbs” and if you click here the hyperlink will take you to the blog’s “home” page.

This is my home online. It’s where you can find me. If you want to know me, knock on the door, and I’ll let you in.

2. To figure out what I have to say.

I made this point in Show Your Work! and elsewhere: I didn’t start a blog because I had something to say, I started a blog to find something to say.

Every time I start a new post, I never know for sure where it’s going to go. This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say. It’s thinking on the page or the screen or in whatever materials you manipulate. Blogging has taught me to embrace this kind of not-knowing in my other art and my writing.

Here’s how Marc Weidenbaum put it in his celebration of blogging on the twentieth anniversary of his blog, Disquiet.com:

Don’t leave writing to writers. Don’t delegate your area of interest and knowledge to people with stronger rhetorical resources. You’ll find your voice as you make your way. There is, however, one thing to learn from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery. Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.

That last line is worth repeating: “Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.”

In my case, a single post becomes two posts, and two posts birth a blog tag, and a blog tag often births a book chapter. (Or a whole book.)

3. Because I like it.

This doesn’t get said enough in this culture: You should do things because you like them, because they’re satisfying.

It is very easy to be disciplined when you like what you’re doing.

Blogging is very satisfying to me — even more satisfying, in many ways, than having a book in a bookstore or a page in a newspaper. If I have an idea or an image I want to riff on, I sit down for half an hour or an hour, and then I publish it where anyone can see it. Instant self-publishing. Instant gratification.

Yes, I think I’ll keep blogging, because I like it, and also because, as Van Morrison put it, “It’s too late to stop now!”

Thank you for reading.