Austin Kleon

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Something to do

I was feeling angry and despondent yesterday, and I drew these two cactus plants on our back porch and immediately felt a little bit better. (Drawing is part of a cure.)

In this video, John Green talks about drawing and productivity and thinking about time and why he’s attempting to draw 170,000 circles. My friend @craghead, one of my favorite drawers, had a great response:

I love that he talks about drawing as more than representing – as a process, as discovery, as a battery recharger…. My wife says to me – “Go draw something” and then I draw a leaf or a synth or something and I fell better. Even drawing Trump helps. We are so lucky to have drawing.

There’s an essay in Zadie Smith’s Intimations called “Something To Do,” in which she thinks about why she writes. She comes around to this very simple truth: “It’s something to do.”

Of the pandemic and lockdown, Smith writes, “The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do with it… There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.”

On a recent episode of Call Your Girlfriend, however, Smith says she discovered that writing was more than a hobby — Can you imagine? Being Zadie Smith and still thinking of writing as a hobby? — it’s something she needs to do to stay alive.

I, too, am grateful to have something to do, whether it’s making a zine or drawing a cactus or writing this blog. Like Smith, I am not by my nature an activist, and so, as she puts it: “I just do the thing I can do.” The work in front of me.

Churchill’s free verse


Winston Churchill’s speech in response to Germany’s invasion of Britain

Today I learned that Winston Churchill had his speeches typed up in what looks like free verse (or “Psalm form,” as his office called it) so that he could plan and rehearse the rhythm and the pauses. (More here.)

NPR:

Churchill wrote every word of his many speeches — he said he spent an hour working on every minute of a speech he made. At the Morgan Library are several drafts of a single speech from February 1941, when England stood alone against the Nazi onslaught and Churchill appealed to President Roosevelt for aid. The first draft looks like a normal typescript; the final draft, says Kiely, “looks like a draft of a poem.”

Here’s a draft of Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech, compared with the final “Psalm form”:

Another thing I learned about Churchill: he took up painting at the age of 40 to battle his depression and wrote a book about it called, Painting as a Pastime:

Just to paint is great fun. The colours are lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out. Matching them, however crudely, with what you see is fascinating and absolutely absorbing. Try it if you have not done so – before you die.

God bless the English and their penchant for hobbies!

Cold feet

My first Peanuts collage of the year. It hits me over and over again how there’s rarely anything “random” about collage — your eye is caught on images because of who you are, what you’re inclined and trained to look for.

It reminds me of Tristan Tzara, describing the seemingly unoriginal cut-up method as a way towards originality, or Kenneth Goldsmith in Uncreative Writing, who writes that “the suppression of self-expression is impossible” and that the “act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves” as anything else. “It’s just that we’ve never been taught to value such choices.”

And, of course, there’s what you choose to share…

James Pennebaker on therapeutic journaling

A few days ago I was reading an article about journaling as self-care, and came across several quotes by local Austin professor James Pennebaker, author of The Secret Life of Pronouns and Opening Up By Writing It Down. Pennebaker had this to say about when and how and how long to journal therapeutically:

Dr. Pennebaker’s research has found that even a one-time 15-to-30-minute session of focused journal writing can be beneficial. In fact, he said he is not “a big fan of journaling every day.”

“One of the interesting problems of writing too much, especially if you’re going through a difficult a time, is that writing becomes more like rumination and that’s the last thing in the world you need,” he said. “My recommendation is to think of expressive writing as a life course correction. As opposed to something you have commit to doing every day for the rest of your life.”

If you’re distressed about something, Dr. Pennebaker advises, set aside three to four days to write for 15 to 20 minutes a day about it. If you don’t find a benefit from it, he says, “stop doing it. Go jogging. See a therapist. Go to a bar. Go to church.”

I drew these notes during a Pennebaker lecture back in 2011. Fascinating guy.

Self-help as oxymoron

Matt Haig, Reasons To Stay Alive

After I wrote a long post about self-help, I listened to an interview with Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. I had completely forgotten the beginning of that book:

LOOK, UNLESS YOU’RE WRITING ONE, A SELF-HELP book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of how-to books, for example. And it’s true of personal improvement books too. […] None of the foregoing means self-help books are useless. On the contrary, they can be useful indeed. But it does mean that the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry.

In the interview, Hamid talks more about what he learned from writing in the self-help format:

…what I liked about the self-help book form was I started to realize that in a way I actually do write novels to help myself. You know, I sit by myself in a room for several years, which isn’t a normal thing to do, and out of it comes a novel. So there is some degree of self-help just in writing a novel. But also when I read a novel, I feel like there is a kind of self-help going on there too, that I’m going beyond myself, transcending myself, I’m encountering another consciousness, I’m leaving the place where I am.

To repeat Josh Shenk, writing is self-help, because “we’re writing to help ourselves.”

Once through, cleanly

Frank Chimero’s description of how he designs a poster:

I’m a big proponent of ‘once through, cleanly’. You think about your idea, sketch, then put some glue in your chair and bang it out in one sitting. All of my best work happens this way: posters, collages, essays, outlines for talks, and so on. The work seems to be more cohesive and the energy more concentrated and palpable. If you sit down and what you make is bunk, you walk away, come back later and start over. You don’t keep any of what you’ve done before, you only retain the memory of what went wrong. It’s a silly method, but it works for me.

This is how my best work comes, too: Everything I’ve done that’s good has come really fast and furious after a (seemingly endless) period of messing around and aborted attempts.

For the book I’m working on, in between drafts, I didn’t do any cutting and pasting: I started with a clean document each time, and retyped anything I was keeping from a (printed out) previous draft. This forced me to re-read everything and fix things up as I went. Every draft was start-to-finish, and each draft had a kind of momentum to it. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t a shitty first draft, just that I started each draft with clean potential.

As always: Everybody’s different. Whatever works.

Coming up with a title

“When I’m finished and the work is off the loom, it sits there and ruminates. Then it starts having a name in spite of myself.”
—Sheila Hicks

“Part of the impetus to name things is that if you don’t they get called Untitled, and that just gets to be a drag to have a thing referred to as ‘untitled.’”
—John McCracken

I’m one of those writers who likes to come up with the title for the piece first and then write the thing. That’s how my last two books worked, but now I’m working on this new book, and nobody can agree on any of the titles I’ve come up with so far.

In My Life in France, Julia Child writes about what a pain in the ass it was to come up with the title for Mastering The Art of French Cooking. She and her husband Paul debated “the merits of poetic titles versus descriptive titles.” They made lists and lists of titles, trying to come up with the right “combination of words and associations” that would work.

Editor Judith Jones (who got the original manuscript with the title “French Recipes for American Cooks”) finally came up with the title after “playing with a set of words like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to get them to fit together.” (Dramatized in the movie, Julie & Julia.) This seems to me like a totally sensible approach, so I’m stealing it: I’m writing words I like on index cards, and shuffling them around.

Still, even if you come up with a great title, there will be Unbelievers. Alfred Knopf, when he heard Jones’ title, supposedly shook his head and said, “I’ll eat my hat if anyone buys a book with that title!”

Above: pages from Every Day a Word Surprises Me and quotes from Art is the Highest Form of Hope.

The loom

More and more I think it is a mistake to think that the more productive you are, the happier you’ll be. I have been working like mad on a recent project, cranked out thousands of words, and at the end of the days, all I feel is exhausted. Nervous. Wrung out. I’ve noticed this on days that I produce a tremendous amount of art, too. The making feels good, and it feels somewhat good to look back on what I’ve produced, but it also reminds me of all that I didn’t produce. And all I wrote that, tomorrow, probably won’t even be that great. Productivity does not equal happiness for me. I do not seek it there.

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