Austin Kleon

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Soup lessons

Last Friday I wrote a newsletter called “In The Soup”:

It’s still soup season. Last month I tweeted, “Soup has a few lessons to teach us. One is: Sometimes things get better tomorrow.” A few days ago The Soup Peddler here in Austin, Texas posted an elegant edit: “Soup teaches us some things get better tomorrow.” (Note: some things, not all things.)

I got to wondering what the other lessons of soup would be, so I made a zine called Soup Lessons:

I’ve been thinking a lot about this back-and-forth chain-smoking process, how you throw out one thing, see how people react, throw out another thing based on that, and just keep doing this until you get somewhere interesting.

It’s really obvious, but: The way you keep this process going is you… do stuff. You do one thing, and one thing leads to another.

Motivational posters

I finished up a big draft of my manuscript and got to thinking about what’s really worked for me this time around.

I thought it’d be fun to turn some of my pep talks to myself into posters you can download and print.

You can download them here.

The posters were drawn straight into my diary then blown up and cleaned up.

This image was at the top of last Friday’s newsletter, titled “So what?”

I shared a batch of 7 questions I ask myself when I don’t know what to do next and y’all had so many great responses and questions of your own! Some of my favorites: “What advice would you give to a friend with this problem?” “Really?” “Who are you when no one is watching?” “What would this look like if it were easy?” “What if this was fun?” “So what?”

More in the newsletter.

The cease-and-desist of winter

I do a lot of RIPs in the newsletter, and not to be grim, but this time of year… a lot of people die.

Sometimes on a Thursday after I’ve finished the Friday newsletter and arranged it exactly how I wanted it, I’ll get the news that someone who merits an RIP has died and I’ll have to decide whether to go back and change the newsletter or not.

David Lynch was too big to squeeze in last-minute last week, so I gave him a big number one spot this week:

“The old is dead, and I don’t know what the new is. The only way to find the new is to start different things and see if there’s something that can come out of experimentation. It’s somewhat unsettling, but it’s a hopeful thing in a way. I’ve been here before, lots of times.” RIP filmmaker and artist David Lynch. I’d love to wipe my brain so I could watch Twin Peaks for the first time — the first two seasons are streaming for free on Pluto TV and The Criterion Channel is streaming the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life for free until the end of the month. Lynch “didn’t fully trust words” as his friend Kyle MacLachlan put it, but he wrote a good book about his approach to creativity called Catching The Big Fish, and I just picked up a book of his interviews called Lynch on Lynch. Even if he didn’t fully trust them, he dished out many words of wisdom: “An artist doesn’t have to suffer to create.” “Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole.” “Fix your hearts or die.” “Every day, once a day, give yourself a little present.”

You can read the rest — and the other RIPs, both giants in their fields — in the newsletter: “The cease-and-desist of winter.”

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