Austin Kleon

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Inspiring diaries

Duncan Hannah, diary

I’m devouring Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies right now. My only gripe with the book is you don’t get a sense for how wonderfully visual his notebooks were.

Owen Kleon, diary

More inspiration came this morning, courtesy of my 5-year-old’s diary. (Everything on that page after the words “as usual” is invented.)

I keep a huge file of inspiring notebooks on my tumblr, which I relied on when making The Steal Like An Artist Journal. Here’s a slideshow talk I gave a few years back with some of the highlights:

See also: Diary of a 5-year-old.

Diary of a 5-year-old

We have talked the 5-year-old into keeping a casual diary of sorts, and, while it’s so fun to see his days summarized in his little hyphenated paragraphs, it’s also really surprising, too. For instance, we’d thought that he had a terrible time on the day mentioned above! He moped around and complained about the heat and all the walking. It’s a reminder that if you have a kid who keeps things close to the chest, giving them tools to express themselves (in O’s case it’s Garageband on the iPad to write songs, or a pen and a nice notebook for a diary) gives you this whole different glimpse into who they are and what they’re feeling and thinking.

The best thing (cheerful retrospection)

When I write in my diary, I often try to start with Paul Chowder’s advice in the novel The Anthologist, paraphrased this way by author Nicholson Baker, and quoted in Steal Like An Artist:

If you ask yourself, ‘What’s the best thing that happened today?’ it actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pulls up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn’t otherwise think about. If you ask yourself, ‘What happened today?’ it’s very likely that you’re going to remember the worst thing, because you’ve had to deal with it–you’ve had to rush somewhere or somebody said something mean to you–that’s what you’re going to remember. But if you ask what the best thing is, it’s going to be some particular slant of light, or some wonderful expression somebody had, or some particularly delicious salad. I mean, you never know…

Sometimes the Best Thing is not even something I did, but something I watched or listened to:

Sometimes the Best Thing is a stretch:

And sometimes I can’t even come up with it:

Let them say it for you

When I’m writing in my diary I like to draw one of my memento mori comic characters and let them say the awful words floating in my brain.

I do this with many bad thoughts, especially my Bad Editor voice. (“This is terrible,” “you suck,” etc.)

It’s a silly little trick to get the thoughts out of my head and no longer feel any responsibility for them.

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