Austin Kleon

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A portrait of my brain working on 3 talks

Usually when a client hires me to speak, they’re interested in one talk, so I either have to narrow down the scope of what I’m going to talk about, or I have to try to weave in elements from all of my work into some kind of unified theory. A client recently hired me to do something I’ve never done before: three talks over three days!

Conveniently, I have a trilogy of books that map nicely to 3 talks, but because each subsequent book after Steal grew out of the one before it, there’s a bit of crosstalk between them. (For example, the chapters “Something small, every day” from Show, “Every day is Groundhog Day” from Keep Going, and “Be Boring” from Steal all speak to the idea of daily practice and routine.) So, funny enough, I’m combining what I usually do for talks: narrowing each book down to an essential idea, and then building up each talk by weaving in material from all over…

The Goldilocks Theory

I drew this comic in my diary yesterday. With all this talk of languishing and wintering, I have felt my spirit lifting a bit this week. I have a sensation, quite possibly inaccurate, that the day-to-day of my life is moving out of the crushing into the merely annoying. This is usually a very ripe condition in which to grow my efforts! If life is too crushing, it’s hard to get to work, and if life is too good, who the hell wants to work?

The hassles of work become a welcome distraction from the hassles of life. Of course, if I want to sustain any kind of lasting effort, I have to work every day, no matter what is going on, and expect nothing, but the applying of ye ass to chair.

Camus: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Every day is Groundhog Day.

This was true before the pandemic, by the way. The comic at the top of this post is a redrawing of this comic I drew in my diary four years ago.

Life is a porridge. Some porridge is too hot. Some porridge is too cold.

This porridge is just right.

He could sing the phone book (or an oven manual)

“People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good.”
—Edith Piaf

“Elton would say to me, “Why don’t you put out more albums?” I would say, “Why don’t you put out less albums?”
—Billy Joel

In this clip from 1997’s An Audience With Elton John, the actor Richard E. Grant asks Elton John if he can create a song out of his oven’s instruction manual. Elton obliges.

This might seem miraculous, but it’s, essentially, exactly how Elton John works in his partnership with Bernie Taupin:

[Taupin] labors for weeks on his horse ranch in Southern California and delivers the lyrics fully formed to Mr. John, who goes into a studio, props the papers on the piano and churns out melodies and harmonies to fit the words at breakneck speed. “It’s kind of spooky,” Mr. John said in an interview. “I get bored if it takes more than 40 minutes.”

John says he barely looks at the lyrics before he goes into the studio to write. He says he likes to go in fresh, and let the lyrics evince melodies and music out of him.

This way of working goes all the way back to their very first days of collaborating, including their first hit, “Your Song”:

“I wrote that song one morning when Elton and I shared an apartment in Northwood Hills just outside of London. And I remember writing it as I was having breakfast. The original lyric had tea-stains on it.”

“[Elton] wrote it the same day. We went into the room where the piano was and just hammered it out.”

In the second volume of Paul Zollo’s wonderful Songwriters on Songwriting, Taupin displays an unreserved awe for his partner’s “borderline genius”:

It’s ridiculous. He has written four songs in a day sometimes. Sometimes he doesn’t even write songs before he goes into the studio. He goes in the studio on the morning that they are going to start recording and writes a couple of songs, and when they come in he starts recording. Go figure.

It’s hilarious to me that Taupin works so hard on his lyrics and John is so casual with them:

I put them all in a folder. And he just goes to the piano, puts the folder up, and sees what catches his eye. He’ll skim through it. I’m sure he looks at titles too. Sometimes he won’t even read through a lyric. He’ll just start. [Laughs] He won’t even understand what the song’s about till probably it’s recorded, and six months later he’ll come up to me and say, “You know, just figured out what that song’s about.”

You could give him the phone book — or an oven manual! — and he’d write you a song.

Blexbolex’s Ballad

If you’re lucky, the overlap in the Venn diagram of books you love to read and books your kids love to read is more than a sliver.

Blexbolex’s Ballad is a mysterious little book. Starting with a simple, 3-page chapter about a child who walks home from school (“The school, the road, home.”) the second chapter adds a page in between each previous page (“The school, the street, the road, the forest, home.”) and the author continues that pattern for 7 chapters, eventually culminating in a story of over 50 pages.

There’s a wonderful post over at Picturebook Makers where Blexbolex talks about his process:

The trigger of the form was firstly my stay with a group of artists working on comics in an unconventional way: OuBaPo. One of the exercises captured my imagination. It involved inserting one square of a comic strip between two existing squares, thereby diverting the narrative ellipsis towards another one. Then a meeting with a group of children gave me the real key to the book. They were playing a game where whatever path they took, they always got to arrive home.
a diagram of the book’s structure by Blexbolex

 

Blexbolex’s thumbnail sketches

The OuLiPo-inspired hijinx would be impressive on their own, but what’s truly amazing to me is that for a book that feels so analog and textured, almost all of the artwork was done digitally:

The images for the book are purely digital. Only three backgrounds on paper (two with pencil and one with ink wash painting) were scanned in to allow me to add substance to the shapes drawn on the computer.

This process makes the book something that feels both ancient and futuristic, or rather, simply out-of-time.

This post is the first in a new Bookshelf series in which I’ll be sharing one of my favorite books every Saturday.

Scraps into poetry

My desk.

While many writers are turning to the calm of collage as an escape from needing words, Hanif Abdurraqib is turning to self-collage and assembling his leftover scraps into poetry:

[I am] recycling my way toward a feeling of productivity. I copy and paste email responses that work across multiple inquiries. If I don’t feel up for making a morale-boosting lunch, I pile some leftovers into a bowl and hope for the best. I’ve found myself doing this with poems, as well. Piling leftovers onto the page and seeing what makes sense. I don’t throw away drafts of my poems. I keep them all in a folder on my computer. If I cared for something enough to write it, I care for it enough to imagine that it might be useful later.

About once a week, I’ve been digging through my folder of misfit poems and constructing new ones out of them. It’s like a joyful puzzle. The work of writing is already done. The work of arrangement is where the excitement is.

This is a fine method for artists of all kinds. A little hoarding goes a long way. You never know when a discarded scrap from something can be turned into something new. (Keep Going contains a whole section that didn’t fit into Show Your Work!)

Sticky note collages

In my never-ending borderline-OCD quest to never waste anything and make something of my by-products, I’ve started keeping a pad of sticky notes on my desk and when I have unused scraps from my collages I add them to a note. Eventually the note becomes its own collage, sometimes more interesting than the “real” collage I was working on. (The note above was made while tidying my desk and talking to the friend on the phone.)

Something you can live with

I’m an imperfectionist when I’m working, so I’m usually puzzled by perfectionists and their problems.

“I figure I’m going to be living with this song for a long time,” says Weird Al Yankovic, in regards to his painstaking process of crafting parody lyrics. “We’ll probably be doing it onstage for the rest of my life. It’s got to be right.”

I like this argument for craft, especially for books. Make it good enough that you can live with it for the rest of your life! Or, if that’s too much (and it is, really) make it good enough that you can live with it for at least the next couple years while you hawk it…

A secret sentence

Page from the FOOD issue of ILLUSTORIA magazine

Sometimes when I begin a project, I want to slip my vision of the finish into a fortune cookie, forget about it, then crack it open at the end and see how close I got.

Talking to my friend Dan Roam about the structure of Keep Going, I mentioned that I was thinking a bunch about time when I wrote it, which is why it starts with days and ends with seasons. Time in the micro and a macro sense.

“I didn’t even notice that,” Dan said. “It’s like an Easter Egg!”

We got to talking about things you hide in your work that you know nobody’s ever going to see just to keep the work interesting for you.

Since we both write books, I confessed that with each book I usually have a secret sentence that I write down somewhere but don’t show to anybody. That sentence is sort of my North Star for the project, the thing I can rely on if I get lost.

The sentence usually doesn’t mean anything to anyone other than me. And sometimes it’s pretty dumb. (When I was writing Show Your Work! the sentence was: “What if Brian Eno wrote a content strategy book?”)

I mentioned this to my wife and she pointed out it’s a little like the little messages Reynolds Woodcock sews into his dresses in Phantom Thread. (I’ve seen that movie probably six times since it came out a few years ago.) The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, has talked about how close he needs to keep his movies when he’s making them, before the film is exposed. 

Which reminds me: Sometimes readers are upset by the idea that I might want to keep secrets. “Aren’t you the guy who said we should share?” Yes, but the message of Show Your Work! was never share everything with everybody. The real message was: Show the scraps and bits and by-products of your process that you think would be useful or interesting to the people you’re trying to reach, and anything you need to hold back, hold it back, and keep it as close as you need it to be, until the work is done.

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