Austin Kleon

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

Laziness and discipline

I have written often of the deep connection I feel between my laziness and my productivity.

Here’s writer Hanif Abdurraqib on The Stephen Satterfield Show, putting it much more poetically, so much so that I thought it was worth transcribing in full:

I came to writing significantly later than most of my peers. I have no ‘formal education’ in writing, I didn’t study writing in college, I wasn’t very good at school. But I always had these obsessions and interests and excitements, particularly around music. And for me that meant that for a long time, because I wasn’t a writer, those things were just building, and I would store them. I kind of have an internal archive of excitements and I did not always have access to a place for them….

I constantly sit on a lot of ideas. So what that means for me is that I have to be disciplined and kind of thoughtful.

I’m very lazy!

I think there are multiple kinds of people in the world: There are people who are hard-working and disciplined. There are people who are hard-working but pretty un-disciplined — so there’s a scattershot way their work appears in the world. And me, I’m pretty lazy, but I’m very disciplined. Perhaps more disciplined, I would guarantee, than anyone you know.

Satterfield asks him how somebody can be both lazy and disciplined.

They act in opposition to each other, right?

So the laziness is kind of inherent. Which means that I know that left to my own devices, I would do nothing. I would prefer to do nothing. And I don’t mean nothing in the sense of like, replying-to-an-email nothing, I mean literally, not-getting-out-of-bed nothing.

I was an athlete. I played basketball, I played soccer in college. So I had to learn a type of discipline, because my love for what I was doing propelled me towards that discipline.

Suzan-Lori Parks, a playwright who I adore, says this thing about how discipline is simply a love for your big self. And that’s kind of the path that I follow, because I’m driven to get the things I’m excited about out of my head. Because I don’t know how good they do me — just me in the world — if they’re only in my head.

And that isn’t saying that everyone needs to see them, it just means that there has to be some kind of extraction process that fuels and excites me. Writing does that. Writing about music, specifically, does that.

I can be in opposition to my inherent laziness, and build a discipline around, not even the work of writing, but the work of joyful extraction. And to present it like that, and to put it like that, offers me a better runway to it.

And I cannot stay in bed, because I would much rather be in pursuit of some revelation that might arrive to me in the process of doing this work.

So that’s how I act in opposition to my own laziness.

There’s so much there, and so many phrases I want to clip and build whole pieces out of, like, “an internal archive of excitements” and “joyful extraction.” It’s also impossible for me not to try to read an Ohio thing into it. (Hanif and I were born the same year and grew up about 45 minutes away from each other.)

I also want to join Hanif’s Church Of Minding One’s Own Business. Elsewhere he has said, “My superpower is that I mind my own business. And I actually think that helps my productivity more than anything.”

Filed under: laziness

Anybody who survived childhood

This picket sign reminded me of one of my favorite cartoons by Alex Gregory and Flannery O’Connor in Mystery and Manners:

The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.

Some vegetarians say they won’t eat anything with a face — maybe I’ll say I won’t read anything that didn’t have a childhood.

The thing that sticks out

Here is a visualization from a syllabus for a writing workshop posted by novelist Luke Geddes. (I found it via Matt Bell, who said it “might be most of what you need to know.”)

I think it speaks for itself, but here’s a batch of quotes to back it up from a previous post of mine, “What to leave in and what to leave out”:

David Mamet, in Three Uses Of The Knife:

I used to say that a good writer throws out the stuff that everybody else keeps. But an even better test occurs to me: perhaps a good writer keeps the stuff everybody else throws out.

Peter Turchi told me when he’s teaching writing workshops, he’s careful not to try to “fix” a student’s story too quickly:

[W]e have to recognize that the thing that looks most flawed, might, in fact, be the most interesting thing in the work. So we’re not looking for the thing that functions best, because to do that is to only reward the most conventional and most familiar moves the work makes. But to try to recognize the thing that excites us the most, or intrigues us the most, which may be something the writer doesn’t even understand.

(We spoke about this more, and his vision for writing workshops in this interview.)

Finally, from another angle, here’s Jean Cocteau:

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like — then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.

The writer is the composer, the reader is the musician of the book

Some “unplayable” sheet music by John Stump

In this great interview with James Hannaham, he talks about how his musical background influences his writing:

When you write pretty much anything, you’re essentially asking someone to read a musical score—to hear it in their head. So an attentiveness to sound and rhythm and meter is really useful to your aesthetic as somebody who’s putting words on a page. It’s pretty similar to putting notes on a staff, in its way.

This is also what Margaret Atwood says about writing books:

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

And also what Chris Ware says about comics:

What you do with comics, essentially, is take pieces of experience and freeze them in time….The moments are inert, lying there on the page in the same way that sheet music lies on the printed page. In music you breathe life into the composition by playing it. In comics you make the strip come alive by reading it, by experiencing it beat by beat as you would playing music…

Filed under: music

Hunters and farmers

I’ve written about “pirates and farmers.” Here is Jack Miles, on the difference between an academic and an intellectual:

Academics are farmers. They have fields, and they cultivate their fields well. Intellectuals are hunters. An intellectual does not have a field but a quarry which he pursues across as many fields as necessary, often losing sight of it altogether. Hunters cannot replace farmers, or vice versa; but if liberal learning in America, hitherto mostly a farm culture, becomes progressively a hunt culture, there will surely be consequences. By the standards of farmers, what hunters do seems reckless and undisciplined, but hunting has its own interior logic, the logic of an agenda that is individually rather than collectively determined.

One cannot easily be either a farmer or a professor by avocation. The strength of these vocations is that they demand full commitment. Mirroring their strength, their great vulnerability is their inability effectively to reward and sustain partial commitment. By contrast, one may rather easily be a hunter or an intellectual by avocation. Like hunters, who join the chase when they can and leave it when they must, sharing the kill with the tribe when they are successful, so intellectuals study when they can and stop when they must, seeking ever to please themselves but sharing their intellectual pleasure, when they write, with their readers.

The agricultural revolution did not occur for no reason. Hunters are more likely to go hungry than farmers. If academics, reliably supported by their universities, are succeeded by intellectuals, only unreliably supported by the work they pick up here and there, the post- and extra-academic humanities will often go hungry and homeless. But hunting does not differ from farming only by being more hazardous and less reliable. Off campus, the liberal arts may, at least on occasion, enjoy a wild adventure and an extraordinary feast. Only time will tell — but less time, if present trends continue, than we might think.

A few thoughts:

  1. You may be puzzled, as I was, by the word “quarry” — you might’ve thought of it as in a stone quarry, or a site of excavation. It actually refers to prey, or game, something sought or pursued, such as “game hunted with hawks.” (I almost misread it as “query,” which I like even more — the intellectual has a query, which they seek out, “across as many fields as necessary, often losing sight of it altogether.”
  2. If we go with the hunter/farmer metaphor, what about trappers? A trapper is a kind of hunter, but a specific one. You could argue that a blog post is a kind of bait, or trap set.

Sara Hendren, who alerted me to Miles’ piece in the first place, maps these modes of operating to “generalists and specialists”:

[S]pecialists tend to embody the disposition of farmers, while generalists tend to embody the virtues of hunters. Both are necessary, and both need each other. The careful tending to a field whose needs are more or less known, protected, and nurtured further, on the one hand. And the more landscape-crossing, round-the-next-bend pursuit of the not yet known and its promised nourishment, on the other.

Just the other day it occurred to me that, duh, one of the reasons I’m probably so interested in this “cowboy vs. farmer” distinction is that I am a cowboy/farmer hybrid — my mom grew up a farmer’s daughter, and my dad grew up wanting to be a cowboy — shoeing horses and riding in rodeos.

(Again, I would like to be a pirate gardener.)

AI can’t kill anything worth preserving

The title of this post was stolen from John Warner, whose book Why They Can’t Write was recommended to me by a friend. He tweeted a really excellent thread about how AI’s “correct-seeming” prose is an opportunity to rethink and improve how we teach students writing. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s the highlight for me:

(James Brown summarized this as “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing.” It has become the default setting in American life.)

Warner wrote a followup post, “ChatGPT can’t kill anything worth preserving” that is also worth your time. Warner’s big idea is that students aren’t actually being asked to “express express themselves inside a genuine rhetorical situation (message/audience/purpose)” but are rather being asked to produce “writing-related simulations, utilizing prescriptive rules and templates (like the five-paragraph essay format)” which do fine on standardized tests, but don’t prepare them for writing at the college level, or writing anything that, you know, an actual human being would want to read.

“We made a mistake thinking it was a good thing to train students to write like an algorithm,” he writes. “Now we know we have to undo that mistake.”

Some of his suggestions are to “make the work worth doing,” to “value the process, rather than the product,” and to “move away from what an algorithm can do and towards how humans learn and develop.”

This strikes me as excellent advice not just for teachers, but for writers and artists of all kinds.

People keep asking me about AI and I really think how you feel about AI comes down to whether you believe art is about producing things (images, objects, data files, “content”) or about a way of operating in the world as an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional creature.

How you think it is to be a human.

As Warner puts it, writing “is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind, the same way a vigorous hike through the woods can put me in touch with my body.”

Emphasis on embodied. Head, heart, and hands.

“As human[s], we are wired to communicate,” Warner writes. “We are also wired for ‘play.’ Under the right circumstances, writing allows us to do both of these things at the same time.”

Whether you’re into AI or not, it’s worth spending some time honoring what is not machine-like in you.

And if you’re going to spend time with machines, be sure to spend time with machines that make you feel more human.

Water in the well

“Find your own water,” 2016

Water is always on one’s mind in Texas. We are in a bad drought down here, but luckily, for me, for once, the drought is literal and not metaphorical.

Some Hemingway (from his Paris Review interview), courtesy of George Saunders:

Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job even though only a few hours a day are spent on the actual writing. A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

And elsewhere:

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Hemingway here is talking about subtraction — John McPhee talks about the addition:

If somebody says to me, You’re a prolific writer—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.

(All emphasis mine.)

Plumbing issues are usually matters of input and output.

The Four Energies

When reading Jane Friedman’s newsletter, I came across this great bit by writer Bill O’Hanlon, from his book, Becoming A Published Therapist:

In my view, there are four main energies you can tap into when you write your book. The main writing energy you discover may be just one or you may find that you have a combination of more than one of these energies that fuels your writing endeavors. The four energies are Blissed, Blessed, Pissed, and Dissed. The first two represent the positive energies; the last two, the “negative.”

The energies are split between “what you love and what upsets you”:

  • “Blissed” energy comes from what you’re on fire for and can’t stop doing.
  • “Blessed” means you’ve been gifted something that you feel compelled to share.
  • “Pissed” means you’re pissed off or angry about something.
  • “Dissed” means you feel “dissatisfied or disrespected.”

O’Hanlon goes on to say many of his early books were “written from a combination of pissed and blissed.”

(I can relate: much of my work comes from being a combination of angry and curious.)

O’Hanlon’s point is that ideas aren’t enough, you need energy to see you through a creative project, and if you can identify that energy and where it comes from, it can help your work.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

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