Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for NOTES ON WRITING AND DRAWING

A good assistant to your future self

This morning I was flipping through my copy of the Bicycle Sentences Journal that illustrator Betsy Streeter sent me and I was quite taken with this final paragraph by Grant Petersen. (I’m a big fan of his blog and Just Ride.)

He touches on why I keep a diary, why I keep it on paper, and the magic of keeping a logbook. The mundane details can bring back sublime memories, and what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future: “What seems bland when you write it down… will seem epic in thirty years.”

I have a new studio routine where when I’m unsure of what to write about, I revisit my notebooks each year on today’s date. (I have notebooks going back 20 years, daily logbooks going back 15, but I’ve kept a daily diary for 5 years now. That’s where a lot of gems are buried.)

Flipping through these notebooks will usually yield something worth writing about. (This morning, it was William Burroughs on language.)

Reading my diary this way, which I first learned from reading Thoreau’s diary, also shows me the cycles and patterns of my life.

(For example: Cocteau Twins and the beginning of spring are somehow intertwined in my life. What does that mean? And what does the fact that their lyrics are barely understandable mean when matched with the Burroughs? Spring is a season of rebirth… When babies are new, they babble and make noise without language… do they sound like spring to me for this reason? You can see how these thoughts, none of which I had when I woke up this morning, come forth from just reading myself.)

Another way to think about it: Keeping a diary is being a good research assistant to your future self.

This is the advice that art critic Jerry Saltz has tweeted over the years:

Be a good assistant to yourself. Prepare and gather, make notations and sketches in your head or phone. When you work,  all that mapping, architecture, research & preparation will be your past self giving a gift to the future self that you are now. That is the sacred.

I’ve never had an assistant. I am my own best assistant. My assistant-self is my past self loving my future self who’ll need this previous research when I reach for something in my work. My assistant-self has gotten ideas for whole articles, essays from minutes of research online.

Artists: The beautiful thing about giving yourself a little break & not working – those are the times when new ideas flood in from the cosmos & set your “assistant self” in motion, the self that will be there for your “future-self.” Curiosity and obsession always fill the vacuum.

Artists: Be your own best assistant. Do your research. Get your tools and materials in order. These will be the ancestors, spirit guides and self-replicating imagination of your work. This will allow art to reproduce itself in you. You’ll thank yourself during & afterwards.

I have my many moments of self-loathing at my own lack of progress, but one thing I have done right, at least in the past half decade or so: I have been a good assistant to my future self.

Joan Didion said of re-reading notebooks, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.” This is especially true if they have bothered to preserve themselves so we can visit them later.

Yes, a diary is a good spaceship for time travel: for meditating on the present, flinging ourselves into the future, and visiting ourselves in the past.

You have to really love your idea

A page from my book, Keep Going

I saw a clip of writer Robert Greene talking about creative work that really rang true:

“You have to really love your idea. It has to be something from deep within. It has to be personal. It has to excite you on a deep level. Because you’re going to have to persevere for several years. There are going to be a lot of critics, a lot of mean-spirited people are gonna say, ‘You can never do that!’

When you create anything, the spirit you create it with, the energy, the excitement, is translated into the product itself. So when somebody writes a book just for money, you can kind of smell it. When you read the book, it kind of reeks. We can sense that. But when the writer is excited, it excites the reader. So the love and the desire you put into your project will translate.”

3 additional thoughts on this:

1) I would worry less about mean-spirited people, and worry more about well-intentioned people. The mean-spirited you can ignore pretty easily, but the well-intentioned can actually do much more damage, because you really care what they have to say. This includes agents, editors, friends, colleagues, loved ones, etc.

2) Not only will you have to persevere for many years, if your wildest dreams come true and your project is a huge hit, you have to be ready to talk for years — if not decades! — about it. So at the very least, it better be something you were passionate about at the time of its making.

3) I truly believe that great books are sort of crystallizations of the energy of writer at a certain moment in time and magic happens when the reader’s energy and the writer’s energy sort of unlock each other. (I wrote a little more bit about this in the afterword to Steal — you put all the energy in as the writer, but it’s really the reader’s energy that completes the circuit.)

Leonard Cohen on perfectionism

From Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2005):

If it is your destiny to be this laborer called a writer, you know that you’ve got to go to work every day, but you also know that you’re not gonna get it every day. You have to be prepared, but you really don’t command the enterprise.

Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise — we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears, that it’s perfectable — you’re not gonna get it all straight.

I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win….

You understand that, you abandon your masterpiece, and you sink into the real masterpiece…

And also: “You have to write down what you’re going to abandon.” 

A blog post is a search query to find your people

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!

Riding or writing


One of my riding partners is hard of hearing, so sometimes I’ll say I was “writing” and he thinks I’ve said, “riding.” (Or vice versa.) I’m thinking of getting another version of this shirt made that says, “I would but I’m writing that day.” But the truth is, a lot of my writing comes from my riding these days… (Photo by my pal Marty from yesterday evening’s impromptu ride.)

A solution to writer’s block: Transcribe yourself

My Zoom H1 “handy” recorder

Stewart Brand once said to Brian Eno: “Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already — and all you have to do now is find it?”

In a similar vein, I enjoyed this story of how KC Davis, author of the brilliantly-titled How To Keep House While Drowning, wrote their book:

I had long stared at blank word documents, unable to get my thoughts on the page. I’m actually not a great writer — but I am a pretty good speaker. So I went back through my social channels and transcribed every short form video I had ever done on this topic and that left me with all these disjointed paragraphs. I spent another two months trying to decide how to connect these little vignettes into a “real” book and finally realized that my choices were to publish an imperfect book or not publish the perfect book. So I decided to make each section its own chapter — some only a page long.

I’m reminded of this advice from Matt Zoller Seitz:

Here is a technique I suggest to fellow writers who are blocked for whatever reason: just talk about the piece with a friend, record it, then play it back and write down the good stuff. This method also works with Gchat & similar programs. Go straight to document after.

And how Nicholson Baker wrote his brilliant book The Anthologist by filming himself with a camcorder:

He set up a camcorder and recorded himself presenting in various parts of his house. “I would try to rehearse what it would be like to explain something complicated, like iambic pentameter, in a familiar way,” says Baker, who also found himself singing poetry in his own barn, in Maine. “How would you explain it if you’d been thinking about it for twenty years? So I came up with 40 hours of tape and transcribed the audio.”

I suppose one could skip the transcription step by talking directly into the computer’s speech-to-text?

I know a lot of songwriters do this with song ideas: they record a bunch of voice memos on their phone, but then they make time to listen to what they’ve recorded, often on shuffle.

Regardless of the tech you use, the method is: record yourself thinking out loud, and once you’ve transcribed that into a draft: edit yourself by reading out loud.

Homework every night for the rest of your life

Filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan once said, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”

That’s the thing about the job: you’re never “off.” If “everything is copy” (Nora Ephron) then you’re always “on,” even when it looks like you’re doing nothing. (Arm yourself with Gertrude Stein, if only as a joke: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”)

“All things are potential paragraphs for the writer,” wrote Shirley Jackson in her lecture, “Memory and Delusion” (collected in Let Me Tell You):

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

The “always on” thing can feel like a curse, but it’s also a blessing: it means that any boring old experience (grocery shopping, getting stamps at the post office, picking your kids up from school) can become potential fodder for the work, so you’re “always on,” always paying attention, alert, awake to life, alive, casing the joint, looking for stuff to steal.

To find a form that accommodates the mess

sketchbook diagrams of narrative forms suggested in Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode

In a 1961 interview, Samuel Beckett pointed out “the mess” of modern life, “this buzzing confusion.”

“The confusion is not my invention.  We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion.  It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in.  The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.  It is not a mess you can make sense of.”

The Poetry Foundation helps explain:

[Critic David] Hesla notes that the dilemma which confronts the contemporary writer, according to Beckett, “is constituted… by the fact that the writer must take seriously two opposed and apparently irreconcilable claims to his allegiance. On the one hand, he must recognize that the principal fact about modern man’s life is that it is a ‘mess,’ a ‘confusion,’ a ‘chaos.’ On the other hand, the writer, as artist, has an obligation to form. But to admit the ‘mess’ into art is to jeopardize the very nature of art; for the mess ‘appears to be the very opposite of form and therefore destructive of the very thing that art holds itself to be.’”

Beckett said we could no longer keep out the mess, because “it invades our experience at every moment. It is there and it must be allowed in.”

What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be a new form; and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Seems as good of a mission statement as any.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.