AUSTIN KLEON : BLOG : Posts tagged \'NOTES ON WRITING AND DRAWING\'

10 things about writing

May 4, 2018

This was today’s newsletter, but I thought it’d make a good blog post, too, so:

1. Do something small every day and it adds up. (Every day, no matter what, I blog and write in my diary.)

2. I have lots of Daily Rituals when I work: I keep everything in a banker’s box, I scatter index cards and markers around the house, I tack pictures of my heroes on a bulletin boardabove my desk, I press the sleep timer on my clock radio, and I smoke a fake cigarette pencil.

3. First drafts don’t need to be perfect they just need to exist. (More in Anne Lamott’s wonderful book, Bird By Bird.)

4. The tools matter and the tools don’t matter.

5. Notebooks double in power if you take the time to re-read them.

6. It’s way easier to get things done when you’re working on things worth doing.

7. You can spend your time on work, family, or friends, but you can only have two at a time.

8. If you’re blocked, play with blocks.

9. I can’t think about my book if I want to fall asleep at night, so I need to wind down with a good book that’s not in the genre I’m writing in. Comics and fiction work well, but what I really love is trashy rock ‘n’ roll histories, like Please Kill Me, Van Halen Rising, The Dirt, or, the one I’m reading right now, Meet Me In The Bathroom.

10. I think I have it figured out, but every time I write a book, I learn new things.

Coming up with a title

April 13, 2018

“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.

This is how I make a book

March 30, 2018

Productive procrastination for writers who draw: Going through my notebook, I found this clipping from a piece by Edward Carey (author of The Iremonger Trilogy) about how he works.

The loom

February 21, 2018

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.

A person this was not lost on

January 15, 2018

My friend Alan Jacobs recently quoted Zadie Smith: “To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”

Crop rotation

October 6, 2017

From Sam Anderson’s great profile of writer John McPhee:

I grew up surrounded by farm fields — soy beans or corn, depending on the year. When the beans were in, you could still see the horizon, and everything felt wide open, but when the corn was high, the horizon was gone, and you were walled in…

Learning how to learn again

August 10, 2017

I continue to be fascinated by how slow, seemingly inefficient methods make my self-education more helpful and more meaningful.

Example: This week I was reading Jan Swafford’s introduction to classical music, Language of the Spirit, and I wanted to see the lives of all the composers on a timeline. Instead of googling for one, I decided to just make one for myself with a pencil in my notebook. It was kind of a pain, but I had a feeling I’d learn something. Pretty much immediately I was able to see connections that Swafford wrote about that just hadn’t sunken in yet, like how Haydn’s life overlapped both Bach’s and Beethoven’s while covering Mozart’s completely. Had I googled a pre-made timeline, I’m not completely sure I would’ve studied it closely enough to get as much out of it as the one I drew.

Another example: I copy passages of text that I like longhand in my notebook, and it not only helps me remember the texts, it makes me slow down enough so that I can actually read them and think about them, even internalize them. Something happens when I copy texts into my notebook that does not happen when I cut and paste them into Evernote or onto my blog.

A lot of this way of studying has been inspired by my son, Owen.

Even before I had kids, I wrote, “We learn by copying… Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.” Funny now that I have a four-year-old budding mechanic, who actually spends a great deal of his time copying photos and drawings of cars, taking them apart in his mind and putting them back together on the page to figure out how they work.

What I love about my son’s drawings is that he does not really care about them once he’s finished them. To him, they are dead artifacts, a scrap of by-product from his learning process. (For me, they’re tiny masterpieces to hang on the fridge.) Milton Glaser says that “drawing is thinking.” I think that drawing is learning, too, and one thing Owen has taught me is that it is more valuable as a verb than it is as a noun.

I felt sure that my children would teach me more than I taught them. I was not anticipating that they would actually teach me how to learn again…

The noun and the verb

July 22, 2015

Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work.

“Forget about being a Writer,” says novelist Ann Packer. “Follow the impulse to write.”

Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb).

Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far more interesting than just wanting the noun.

Better than I deserved

January 9, 2015

First draft of Show Your Work finished

July 2, 2013

I finished the first draft of Show Your Work! today. It’s printed out and sitting on my desk. Nobody has read it other than me. My wife will be the first. Then I’ll take her notes, make some changes, and send it to my editor.

This book has not been easy to write. I’ve been working on it since last summer. The last time I wrote about it was October 2012. I’ve screwed up in more ways than one.

The biggest challenge for me is structure. Once I have a structure, once I have a skeleton, then it’s easy to just pack on the meat. This book started out in three parts, with about two dozen chapters. Now it’s another list of ten, like Steal. Maybe it’ll morph into something else before this is all done.