Austin Kleon

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Look up

An illustration from Keep Going

Last week I read about Richard F. Shepard, a writer and editor at the New York Times who took interns and new reporters at the paper on epic tours of New York, teaching them how to investigate and navigate the city.

He said you can’t really figure out the city unless you travel on foot. Here’s what he wrote in his book, Going Out In New York: A Guide for the Curious:

There is no one real New York. It is more of a collage of bits and pieces, each with its own character, often absolutely contradictory to all others and yet purely New York… The only way to savor these varied panoramas is to stroll through; you can see them by car but you can only feel them on foot.

He also said you have to look up:

Look up, he said. Look especially at second-floor windows above storefronts. That, he liked to say, is where a lot of absorbing action takes place. Why would a perambulating soul wish to miss any of it?

Filed under: walking.

Bleeding control kit


Here is a photo I took at the Richmond Airport sometime during the Keep Going tour. It’s not exactly a secret sentence, but one way I thought of the structure of the book was: the first half is about stopping the bleeding, and the second half is about beginning to heal…

A negative approach

A page from Keep Going

“I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say,” said philosopher Mary Midgley, “and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict.” She admitted it was “a negative approach, as they say, but one that doesn’t seem to run out.”

She was 81 when she said that. She wrote well into her 90s.

This is what writing often is for me: Making a list of everything stupid and idiotic that someone else is saying and then sitting down and trying to articulate the exact opposite.

There. Now you know my secret!

The washing up

“Right, you f—–er! I’m going to do the washing up.” — Withnail & I

I enjoyed Mike Powell’s recommendation of washing the dishes:

It became a welcome ritual, a ballast against the chaos of the everyday. And like any worthwhile practice — marriage, creativity, compassion — it engendered the kind of patience that lets you see how life is something to be managed, not conquered. You might finish a load, but you’ll almost always have another one coming.

(Every day is Groundhog Day.)

And later:

[M]ost of life is ordinary… ordinary isn’t the enemy but instead something nourishing and unavoidable, the bedrock upon which the rest of experience ebbs and flows.

Yes.

Airplane mode

One thing I didn’t even consider when writing Keep Going is that people would read the “Airplane Mode can be a Way of Life” chapter on an actual airplane!

I’m flying almost every day on tour this week, so I’ve been in airplane mode a lot. (Writing this from the Burbank Airport, however — never pay for wi-fi!)

 

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.

New DJ set for My KUTX

I recorded a DJ set for My KUTX in early 2017, and it was one of the highlights of my year, so I was thrilled that Art Levy invited me back into the studio to do a set of songs that kept me going while writing Keep Going.

Art also had some really kind words for the book:

Zine-like in appearance, jumbling together comics, poetry, and artistic advice. The homemade aesthetic and Kleon’s sense of humor help these books transcend the self-help genre that they’re nominally filed under. Kleon’s new book, Keep Going, is especially potent, the kind of book that desperately needed to be written right now. Its starting point is the dilemma that a lot of people are facing: how do we keep making art in a world that just keeps getting messier, and what role does creativity play during anxious times?

You can stream the set online, and if you like the tracks, I made a playlist of them over on Spotify.

Here I am in the studio and here’s the setlist:

Keep Going is on sale now!

I wrote this book because I needed to read it. It’s my best one yet. You can get a copy here or anywhere books are sold.

If you’ve already read it and enjoyed it, please leave it a kind review on Amazon or Goodreads. Those help a ton.

Unboxing

A few days ago the big box of author copies of Keep Going arrived on my front step. This is one of my favorite points in the book timeline. I’m trying to savor the moment of holding something in my hand that I feel is the very best I can do.

Here’s the beginning of a Robert Frost’s “A Prayer in Spring”:

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

It’s spring outside, but the harvest is in, and it is a good one.

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