Austin Kleon

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Greil Marcus: Why I Write

I spent 40 minutes or so this morning watching and doodling Greil Marcus’s “Why I Write” lecture, recommended by Stephanie Zacharek as “deeply personal and… extraordinary. It may help anyone involved in any creative endeavor who’s feeling…stuck.”

It begins:

I write for fun. I write for play. I write for the play of words.

I write to discover what I want to say and how to say it.

And the nerve to say it.

The key word for me isn’t ‘fun,’ isn’t ‘play,’ but it’s ‘discover.’

I live for those moments  when something appears on the page as if of its own volition, as if I had nothing to do with what is now looking at me in the face…

He then tells the story of the father who he never met, who was also named Greil. (Perhaps this is too obvious, but unless I missed something, he never explicitly points out that his name sounds like “grail,” or the mysterious thing which is eagerly pursued and sought after. In fact, if you try to type his name into your computer, spell check will correct it to “grail” — nominative determinism!)

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Read terrible books, too

Here’s the writer Alan Moore on why writers should read terrible books, too:

As a prospective writer, I would urge you to not only read good books. Read terrible books as well, because they can be more inspiring than the good books.

If you are inspired by a good book, there’s always the danger of plagiarism, of doing something that is too much like that good book. Whereas, a genuinely helpful reaction to a piece of work that you’re reading is, ‘Jesus Christ, I could write this shit!’ That is immensely liberating — to find somebody who is published who is doing much much worse than you.

And by analyzing why they are doing so badly, this will immensely help your own style. You’ll find out all of the mistakes not to make. ‘Why did this story offend me so much?’ Analyze that. Find out why you didn’t like it. Find out all of the examples of clumsiness or bad thinking that spoiled the story for you.

That will probably be a lot more helpful to your career as a writer.

Yes! Reading bad writing not only boosts one’s confidence, it can be very instructive.

What you want to avoid, I think, is mediocre writing, which neither thrills nor instructs.

This is what Nassim Taleb calls a “barbell strategy” in Skin in the Game: Read the best and read the worst, but skip everything in the middle…

Thanks to @__mariamuller__ on Twitter.

Related reading: Make Bad Art, Too

Be a good date

A blackout from Show Your Work!

I am fond of Kurt Vonnegut’s assertion that good writing is an act of “sociability.” He said he tried to teach his students “how to be a friend to a reader so the reader won’t stop reading” and “how to be a good date on a blind date with a total stranger.” (From The New York Times, 1999.)

Being a good date to the reader requires a kind of humility, I think, and an understanding that nobody really wants to read a book. (Or a newsletter or a blog post, or whatever.)

Perhaps paradoxically, Vonnegut suggested that one way to be a good date to a total stranger is to try to write for one specific person you know: “If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

Mary Karr writes something similar in The Art of Memoir:

You might ask, though, who are you writing for? Lots of people say, ‘I write for myself.’ I am way less cool. I tend to imagine a writer pal I look up to, maybe a former teacher; or my son; or even my dead priest. That helps me think clearly about what order information goes in… if you were telling a therapist or a friend at lunch, you’d know right away what data went where.

Here’s Stephen King in On Writing:

Someone—I can’t remember who, for the life of me—once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this. I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of the story, the writer is thinking, “I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?” For me that first reader is my wife, Tabitha.

Vonnegut said that in hindsight he realized that he wrote everything he wrote for his sister, just trying to make her laugh…

(Come to think of it, this is why I suggest in Keep Going that if you’re stuck, you might consider making something for somebody specific in your life.)

Words pinned to the wall


Here are some recent additions to my inspiration corner beside my desk.

Here’s a bit from Raymond Carver’s essay, “On Writing”:

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I’ll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing.” Ezra Pound. It is not everything by any means, but if a writer has “fundamental accuracy of statement” going for him, he’s at least on the right track.

I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: “. . . and suddenly everything became clear to him.” I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that’s implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of all–what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief–and anticipation.

I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say “No cheap tricks” to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I’d amend it a little to “No tricks.” Period.

In Tuesday’s newsletter, we’re sharing words we’ve pinned on the wall.

A journal is a magic space to hang out

The journal of Paulus Berensohn

A reader sent me this video of artist Debra Frasier talking about how she creates a picture book:

Towards the middle of the video, she talks about how critical her journal is to her process, how it’s “this active space where a kind of magic happens… it’s not a scrapbook, it’s not a diary, it’s this place.”

She learned to think about journaling this way from her mentor, the artist Paulus Berensohn, a dancer who turned to pottery. (He wrote a popular book called Finding One’s Way With Clay.)

There’s a documentary about Berensohn called To Spring From The Hand, and the website is full of all kinds of interesting stuff about his life and work.

In the mini documentary, Soul’s Kitchen, Berensohn talking about his journal and bookmaking workshops. He says:

The journal is not so much a way of diarizing one’s life, but a portable studio, a place where you can hang out, with your imagination, your intuition, your inspiration.

His emphasis on the journal as a place reminded me so much of what I’ve learned from Lynda Barry: that the page is a place where you go wandering around. (Because I don’t believe in coincidence: I wrote that post on this day 4 years ago.)

Debra Frasier makes an appearance in the documentary and she explains what Paulus taught her:

That you have this antenna that knows where you’re going before your body knows where it’s going. So if you have this journal space, and you allow yourself to trust whatever is drawing your attention, and put it into that journal, it gave me a way to magnetize the question, be alert to the answers, and have a place to store it.

Berensohn himself said making a journal was “like building a nest,” which reminded me of Thoreau’s idea about nest eggs.

Recently I saw a piece about how Americans don’t hang out anymore.

But not only do we not seem able to hang out with others, we can’t even hang out with ourselves.

Your journal is a place to do that.

(And I suspect that if you can hang out with yourself, you can get a little bit better at hanging out with others.)

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!

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