Austin Kleon

A few nights ago, I was looking at the moon and I thought, “I’d like to read a cultural history of the moon.” I googled, and there it was. My friend Matt said, “Ideally, that is exactly how one should find everything they read…and write.”

It’s really that simple. You find the books you want to read… and if you can’t find them, you write them.

Recently it occurred to me that I could use fore-edge indexing as a way to track the structure of a book. I was reading a book and it was going splendidly and then all the sudden I got bogged down. I suspected it had something to do with pacing and chapter length. So I did a fore-edge index and soon I had visual evidence of my suspicion: swelling chapters broke up the flow.

For the writer, your career will be the result of whatever piece you’re working on right now, and the piece you’re working on right now will be the result of whatever sentence you’re working on right now.

Repetition has a bad reputation. Doing the same thing over and over every day conjures images of Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill.

But as Camus wrote, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Or as Prince put it, “There’s joy in repetition.”

As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,

“Step 1: Wonder at something.
Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.”

Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.

Though you might not think it from the comic, I’m actually sympathetic to questions about tools and process, as I myself am a kind of process junky. I love hearing about how other writers work.

I’m also not someone who dismisses questions about tools with the line “the tools don’t matter.” In fact, I think tools matter so much that if you don’t talk about them correctly you can do some damage.

...What I love about John Gardner and Lynda Barry is that they believe that the tools you use do matter, but the point, for them, is finding the proper tools that get you to a certain way of working in which you can get your conscious, mechanical mind out of the way so that your dreaming can go on, undeterred.

You have to find the right tools to help your voice sing.

I am fascinated by the Farmer’s Almanac, and the “Planting by the Moon” guide in particular, which has advice such as: “Root crops that can be planted now will yield well.” “Good days for killing weeds.” “Good days for transplanting.” “Barren days. Do no planting.”

I think it’d be funny to make up an almanac for writers and artists, one that emphasized the never-ending, repetitive work of the craft.

No phrase makes me want to stop reading more. “Don’t get me wrong” is usually a tell — a kind of backpedaling that sets off an internal alarm and suggests I’m a) reading a hyperbolic argument (which, admittedly, describes the majority of online writing these days) or b) that the writer is just lazy. Either way, when I see “don’t get me wrong,” I start to suspect I’m reading a piece of writing that might not be worth my time.

If you find yourself using “don’t get me wrong,” I have a suggestion: Delete the phrase and rewrite what came before it so I don’t get you wrong.

I was inspired to draw out this matrix after stumbling upon a website for a show called “Less Than Perfect” that ran at the Kelsey Museum of Archeology in 2016. The exhibition was organized around three themes:

• Failed Perfection presents objects that failed in production and explores how researchers use them to study ancient economy and technologies.
• Deliberate Imperfection features beautiful and finely crafted objects whose makers purposely introduced asymmetries or other unexpected elements into their products—and considers why artists may choose to make imperfect things.
• Repairing Perfection highlights artifacts that were repaired in antiquity and asks why and how individuals worked to restore usefulness and beauty to certain broken, worn out, or damaged objects.

“Reading is first and foremost non-reading,” writes Pierre Bayard in his book, How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. “Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.”

In that spirit, I made a list of 20 good-looking books published in 2023 that I didn’t manage to read this year.

I drew this diagram last week when I found myself reading a writer who seems to be interested in all the things I seem to be interested in, but they write about them in ways that drive me absolutely nuts. This kind of writer is frustrating because they are both annoying and valuable — I can’t ignore them completely because they have things that I want! These are the writers I skim. I skate over their text with a razor blade, scanning for good quotes and sources and links I can steal, scraping their footnotes and bibliographies. (A writer in this category can become a creative nemesis who motivates me to outdo them.)

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.

...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.

Lewis Hyde on why he still walks with his butterfly net even though he doesn’t collect butterflies anymore:

...As with the pencil, so with the net: Both declare the possibility of action, and that possibility changes the person holding the tool.

It is my opinion that if a book’s contents can be adequately “summed up,” so that you really don’t miss anything by reading the summary, it is not actually a book worth reading. (Of course, there’s no way to tell whether a summary is adequate or not unless you have also read the book.) Also, I suspect that the harder you find it to summarize a book you have read, the more valuable it might be.

Christopher Johnson says “prescriptivists” or “Cute Curmudgeons” — people who are interested in only policing usage and grammar rules  — are “linguistic poison sniffers.” They turn language into “a source of potential embarrassment rather than pleasure.”

Johnson sees his job as getting people to love and appreciate language by being curious about and paying attention to “what makes language delicious.”

This reminded of Olivia Laing’s distinction between identifying poison and finding nourishment.

Everywhere you look these days, there are lots of poison sniffers, but very few cooking a delicious meal…

In the terrific documentary about his work, The Secret Life of Lance Letscher, the collage artist points out that he doesn’t want his file boxes of source material organized too much, that he specifically avoids organizing them, so that he can find unexpected things when he starts searching. “He depends upon that chaos of stuff, of things lying around.”

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There are several paragraphs in Murch’s book about the importance of fighting against the touted “features” of digital tools, such as speed. “The real issue with speed,” he says, “Is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.”

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If I was simply able to execute a full-text search on my notebooks, and pull up exactly what I was looking for, that’s all I’d find: exactly what I was looking for. And the real art is in finding what I didn’t know I was looking for.

A useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments.

I would like to adopt that line as a mission statement: “To be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment rather than identify poison.”

Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you don’t find nourishment, you’ll starve to death.

The method is perhaps best summarized by Mike Monteiro: “The secret to being good at anything is to approach it like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.”

The “curious idiot” approach can serve you well if you can quiet your ego long enough to perform it.

A curious idiot is unafraid to ask stupid questions. Every stupid question you ask takes a teeny, tiny act of courage. Sometimes you have to muster the will to push the words out of your lips.

In the first year, a perennial will focus on its foundation, anchoring its roots, so it can survive dormancy in the winter.

The second year, the plant comes out of dormancy and starts to grow, both up and down — “you can expect to see blooms, though the plant hasn’t quite reached its full size or full flowering potential.”

In the third year, the plant takes off and comes into full form.

Another gardening metaphor we can use for creative work!

So many of my projects tend to follow this sleep, creep, leap structure.

Your output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: you’re interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work.

Lately I’ve been thinking about being more intentional with input. Thinking about input as collage. Taking the principle of juxtaposition (1+1=3) and using that to guide your input: what weird, seemingly disparate things can you feed your brain that will come out later in a new mix?

The input collage can be subject or genre based and even better if it’s multi-media.

...There’s a balance here between feeding your brain intentionally and then backing off and letting your brain do the subconscious work of mixing your inputs together.