Austin Kleon
Write the books you want to read
The art of finding what you didnât know you were looking for
An Article by Austin KleonIn the terrific documentary about his work, The Secret Life of Lance Letscher, the collage artist points out that he doesnât 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. âHe depends upon that chaos of stuff, of things lying around.â
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There are several paragraphs in Murchâs book about the importance of fighting against the touted âfeaturesâ of digital tools, such as speed. âThe real issue with speed,â he says, âIs not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesnât help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.â
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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, thatâs all Iâd find: exactly what I was looking for. And the real art is in finding what I didnât know I was looking for.
The tools matter and the tools don't matter - Austin Kleon
An Article by Austin KleonThough you might not think it from the comic, Iâm 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.
Iâm also not someone who dismisses questions about tools with the line âthe tools donât matter.â In fact, I think tools matter so much that if you donât 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.
Input as collage
An Article by Austin KleonYour output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: youâre interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work.
Lately Iâve 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 itâs multi-media.
...Thereâs 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.
If a book can be summarized, is it worth reading?
An Article by Austin KleonIt is my opinion that if a bookâs contents can be adequately âsummed up,â so that you really donât miss anything by reading the summary, it is not actually a book worth reading. (Of course, thereâs 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.
Ignorant, but curious
An Article by Austin KleonThe method is perhaps best summarized by Mike Monteiro: âThe secret to being good at anything is to approach it like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.â
The âcurious idiotâ 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.
The most important thing you do
An Article by Austin KleonFor the writer, your career will be the result of whatever piece youâre working on right now, and the piece youâre working on right now will be the result of whatever sentence youâre working on right now.
Finding nourishment vs. identifying poison
An Article by Austin Kleon & Olivia LaingA useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls âreparative readingâ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesnât 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: âTo be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment rather than identify poison.â
Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you donât find nourishment, youâll starve to death.
- ââPoison sniffersââ
Poison sniffers
An Article by Austin KleonChristopher Johnson says âprescriptivistsâ or âCute Curmudgeonsâ â people who are interested in only policing usage and grammar rules â are âlinguistic poison sniffers.â They turn language into âa source of potential embarrassment rather than pleasure.â
Johnson sees his job as getting people to love and appreciate language by being curious about and paying attention to âwhat makes language delicious.â
This reminded of Olivia Laingâs distinction between identifying poison and finding nourishment.
Everywhere you look these days, there are lots of poison sniffers, but very few cooking a delicious mealâŠ
Almanacs and cyclical time
An Article by Austin KleonI am fascinated by the Farmerâs Almanac, and the âPlanting by the Moonâ guide in particular, which has advice such as: âRoot crops that can be planted now will yield well.â âGood days for killing weeds.â âGood days for transplanting.â âBarren days. Do no planting.â
I think itâd be funny to make up an almanac for writers and artists, one that emphasized the never-ending, repetitive work of the craft.
Don't get me wrong
An Article by Austin KleonNo phrase makes me want to stop reading more. âDonât get me wrongâ is usually a tell â a kind of backpedaling that sets off an internal alarm and suggests Iâm 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 âdonât get me wrong,â I start to suspect Iâm reading a piece of writing that might not be worth my time.
If you find yourself using âdonât get me wrong,â I have a suggestion: Delete the phrase and rewrite what came before it so I donât get you wrong.
Pointing at things
An Article by Austin KleonThe story goes that the painter Al Held said, âConceptual art is just pointing at things,â so John Baldessari decided to take him literally, and commissioned a bunch of amateur painters to paint realistic paintings of hands pointing at things.
As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,
âStep 1: Wonder at something.
Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.âPoint at things, say, âwhoa,â and elaborate.
Gods of the Word
Imagine that we had no voice and no tongue
Socrates: Imagine that we have no voice and no tongue, but want to communicate with one another. Wouldnât we like the deaf and the dumb make signs with the hands and the head and the rest of the body?
Hermogenes: There would be no choice, Socrates.
Socrates: We would imitate the nature of the thing: lifting the hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness. Heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop toward the ground...
Hermogenes: I donât see that we could do anything else.
Socrates: And when we want to express ourselves with the voice or tongue or mouth, the expression is simply their imitation of what we want to express?
Hermogenes: I think, it must be so.My name
âI am the utterance of my name.â
â Thunder, Perfect Mind, The Nag Hammadi Library
Reference and Is-ness
There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call âinherent meaningâ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is âIs-nessâ meaning. Inherent meaning is a wordâs identity, and reference merely its resumĂ©, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. âIs-nessâ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing â the word â appear to be many things â its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word.
It flows out and fills
This deeper meaning of a word isnât confined to what we think of as a dictionary definition. Rather it flows out and fills all the space available to it. Although a basic sense does affect the dynamics of a word, it has no power over its essence. Like the captain of a ship, it can control the crewâs actions, but not their minds. Each word has an aspect of meaning which lies deeper than any of its senses, and it is fundamentally on this meaning that all the senses depend.
No less than a Zeus
I too am a true believer in the autonomy of the archetype. A
/t/
or an/h/
is no less than a Zeus. The consonants are not essentially physical, but they live, evolve and influence human affairs. We overlook something essential if we deny that they can get up and walk around. This is not to say that their existence is independent of the human psyche. But then everything depends on everything.Like a prism
When you look at phonemes, you look through the perspective of morphemes, which are one linguistic level higher. The higher level is like a prism that splits the light in two. What was one thing, like âlengthâ at the phoneme level, looks like two opposite things âlongâ and âshortâ from the perspective of the morphemes. In practice, when you find both a word and its opposite, then the phoneme is not about either of these two things, but about what is common to them.
Fracturing
If we step back and view from afar this process of One-ness and Is-ness to fracturing and interpretation â of inherent meaning to reference, it follows that what lies at the foundation of language is simply what it is â sound â free of reference and interpretation. What makes what we know as language from its sound is fracturing and interpretation or using a word for a function other than what it simply is.
To evolve the language itself
So in the process of talking, we might say we are putting words in slightly new contexts, and then testing them against our peers to see if our experiment in juxtaposition had âmeaning. If we succeed, we have introduced new contexts for the words we use. These contexts will be taken up by our listeners, and will gradually become clearly enough defined to be thought of as referents. Once our words gain new referents, they start affecting the underlying phonosemantic structure of the language, the clustering patterns, the network of semantic relations. That is, the purpose of talking in the long run is to evolve the language itself.
Scooting over
There is at this point no evidence that acquired characteristics can be inherited. It is held that all changes to a genome are random, and cannot be subject to any higher principle. However, when a word is used in a new context, as it is whenever we say something new, a new sense is permitted. This does affect the phonosemantic structure, the linguistic DNA. Words in the vicinity of this word âscoot overâ to make room and allow themselves to be influenced by its philosophy. The language itself is now different.
The element becomes a sign
Each unit can be seen purely as form, as what it is. Or it can be viewed as having a function. Its function is only understandable within the next higher level of organization. And in every case, function must succumb to the constraints of form. Once this worldly function is assigned, the element becomes a âsignâ. It falls into the realm of concept. There is a mapping from one thought system to another.
The demand of a new word
Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand âfeltâ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that âjerkâ and âtwerpâ and âpunkâ and ânitwitâ and âdorkâ and âassâ and âgoonâ and âtwitâ and âdodoâ and âbumâ and ânerdâ and âdunceâ and âturdâ and âboobâ and âchumpâ and âbitchâ and âbastardâ and âprudeâ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add âturkeyâ and âsquirrelâ as well?