Austin Kleon
Write the books you want to read
The art of finding what you didn’t 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 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.
The tools matter and the tools don't matter - Austin Kleon
An Article by Austin KleonThough 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.
Input as collage
An Article by Austin KleonYour 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.
If a book can be summarized, is it worth reading?
An Article by Austin KleonIt 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.
Ignorant, but curious
An Article by Austin KleonThe 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.
The most important thing you do
An Article by Austin KleonFor 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.
Finding nourishment vs. identifying poison
An Article by Austin Kleon & Olivia LaingA 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.
Poison sniffers
An Article by Austin KleonChristopher 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…
Almanacs and cyclical time
An Article by Austin KleonI 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.
Don't get me wrong
An Article by Austin KleonNo 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.
Pointing at things
An Article by Austin KleonThe story goes that the painter Al Held said, “Conceptual art is just pointing at things,” 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,
“Step 1: Wonder at something.
Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.”Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.
Seeing With Fresh Eyes
Meaning
Space
Data
Truth
The problem with trees
Many systems are organized hierarchically. The CERNDOC documentation system is an example, as is the Unix file system, and the VMS/HELP system. A tree has the practical advantage of giving every node a unique name. However, it does not allow the system to model the real world. For example, in a hierarchical HELP system such as VMS/HELP, one often gets to a lead on a tree such as:
HELP COMPILER SOURCE_FORMAT PRAGMAS DEFAULTS
only to find a reference to another leaf: Please see
HELP COMPILER COMMAND OPTIONS DEFAULTS PRAGMAS
and it is necessary to leave the system and re-enter it. What was needed was a link from one node to another, because in this case the information was not naturally organized into a tree.
Content-responsive space
Content-responsive spaces in text can be as meaningful as spaces and line breaks in computer code, poetry, math, dialogues, cartoons.
For 1500 years, printed text has used grids indifferent/hostile to meaning. Content-responsive grids are better than imperious grid-possessed layouts. To clarify and intensity meaning, authors and editors can remodel relations between spaces and words...insisting on control of line breaks by authors (who, after all, know the content).
Personal annotations
Yehudi Menuhin, a great violinist, marked up a score for Bach's Sonata No. 2 for Solo Violin. Penciled annotations show real-time performance strategies. To outsiders, insider markups appear chaotic and cryptic, but these personal annotations are for Menuhin's eyes, the only eyes that matter. All can learn from this useful workaday grid strategy: a relevant and intense data layer can become a coherent substrate scaffold upon which to overlay additional information. Maps do this all day long.
What excellence is
Learn what excellence is, how to identify it...This is not a big reading assignment – excellence is scarce, lognormal, long-tailed. Acting on this knowledge is liberating, freeing oneself from vast piles of triviality, knock-offs, petty connoisseurship, over-publishing, and the short-sighted, trendy, greedy. Excellence is long-term knowledge, even forever knowledge.
Excellence, like good taste, is perhaps a universal quality. Analytical thinking is about the relationship between evidence and conclusions, and is fundamental to all empirical work, regardless of field, discipline, specialty. Thus it is possible at times to assess credibility of nonfiction work without being a content expert. Thinking eyes may well have an eye for excellence, regardless of field or discipline.
Sentences and words do not exist by themselves
Sentences and words do not exist by themselves, but have natural, inevitable, unavoidable interactions with their surrounding spaces, words, and other sentences. Sentences are not independent of their spatial context, and interactions can create meanings and harms. Sentences survive content-indifferent and content-hostile spacings, but surviving is not thriving. Text space should not be owned and governed by generic productions grids, which make for convenient production but inconvenient meaning. Space can and should be content-responsive, actively contributing to meaning – forever practices in poetry, maps, math, computer code, comics, theater/movie scrips, posters. Subtle visual spacing differentiates and clarifies sentences, and meaning becomes more consequential, memorable, retrievable.
Central-axis text
Central-axis provides a clear signal of the next line, so that readers and speakers don't have to search on the left margin, sometimes accidentally skipping down a line. Ragged-left typography is used for dialogue in novels and scripts. In central-axis, each line is activated at both left and right margins – unlike squared-off conventional text. Readers/speakers are aware of the length of the next line at both its beginning and end. That knowledge may also help readers detect the pace and rhythm of the words, as in reading poetry aloud.
Idiosyncratic paragraphs
Text-only paragraphs differ from one another only in their words. All the words are typographically the same – typeface, spacings, line-lengths piled up into long deep columns. Systematic regularity of text paragraphs is universally inconvenient for readers, who are unable to find and read once against a specific string of words in previously-read paragraphs. All readers have encountered this problem in essays, articles, novels, news reports. Idiosyncratic paragraphs assist memory and retrieval by readers, by uniquely activating the relevant neural substrates for retaining visual memories. Nearly every paragraph in this book is deliberately unique.
No more LittleDataGraphics
Small data sets should be shown directly...LittleDataGraphics (pie charts, bar charts) translate and encode data into areas and colors. Viewers must then mentally translate codes back into numbers. These codes are unique to the local sets of data graphics, and do not repay learning. Instead, just directly show numbers as numbers. No more LittleDataGraphics. Data visualizations are at their best when there is so much data that the only way to see it...is to see it.
An immense wordy diagram
In ~1560 Ettore Ausonia, a polymath with interests from mathematics to mirror-making, constructed an immense wordy diagram depicting reflections from concave spherical mirrors. Then, between 1592 and 1601, while teaching at the University of Padua, Galileo made this handwritten copy of the diagram, which was fortunate since Ausonio's original has since gone missing. Three helpful architectures for the off-the-grid sentences are deployed – word trees, stacklists, annotated linking lines.
Stacklists
Stacklists organize and clarify complex material in 2-space. Readers read more slowly, and that's good: to think, look again, and connect words vertically within each stack and horizontally between stacks. Instead of polyphony, conventional inline lists are a freight train of words along a one-way narrow track, making it difficult to identify which words belong to which list and to link and compare elements within and between lists.
Observe data collection at the moment of measurement
See, observe, learn how data are collected at moment and place of measurement. "You never learn more about a process than when you directly observe how data are actually measured," said Cuthbert Daniel, a superb applied statistician. See with fresh eyes. Walk around what you want to learn about. Talk to those who do measurements. See how numbers came to be.
Do those measuring know the desired answer? Are those measuring skilled, alert, honest, biased, incompetent, sloppy, tired and emotional?...Artifacts and errors in measurements measured? How are outliers adjudicated?
46 data quality issues in spreadsheets
Outcomes decide
High levels of U.S. patient satisfaction are mainly associated with hospitality (greeters at the door, empathetic staff, comfortable rooms) – but also with more treatments, high costs, and substantially higher mortality even after adjusting for baseline health and comorbidities. Several plausible stories explain these big n and replicated observational findings. Whatever the case, post-treatment patient satisfaction/gratitude does not measure whether a treatment works or not. Patient outcomes decide.
Which half?
One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, "Do you have any controls?" Well the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, "Do you mean did I not operate on half of the patients?" The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room hesitantly replied, "Yes, that's what I had in mind." Then the visitor's fist really came down as he thundered, "Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death!" God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, "Which half?"
Good annotation
Information displays should be annotated, combining words, images, graphics, whatever it takes to describe and explain something. Annotation calls out and explains information and, at the same time, explains to viewers how to read data displays. Good annotation is like a knowledgeable expert/teacher at the viewer's side pointing and saying, "Now see how this works with that, how this might explain that..."
Signs seen and unseen
Direct instructions at point of need may encourage writers and programmers to divert diversions. Or not, because signs are seen only a few times before becoming unseen.
What is the strongest visual element?
Preparing to write the novel Catch 22, Joseph Heller composed a storyboard, a 2-dimensional list with 3,650 words arrayed in 34 × 21 = 714 interacting cells. Rows are ordered in time, and each row records when each character does what. Some cell entries are erased. It took 7 years to complete the novel's 758-page typescript.
The Catch 22 plotchart works better upon replacing optically noisy grids with ghost grids. Lightness of framing lines creates soft boundaries to maintain order and also allows words to spill across cells naturally...More generally, ask of information displays and interfaces, "What is the strongest visual element?" The correct answer is not "grid lines".
Your only language is vision
To see with fresh, uninstructed eyes and an open mind requires a deliberate, self-aware act by the observer. Abstract artworks represent themselves and should be first viewed for themselves. When looking at outdoor abstract pieces, concentrate initially on the unique optical experience produced by the artworks. See as the artist saw when making the piece.
A focus on optical experience does not deny stories, it postpones them. Viewing an artwork may evoke interesting narratives – or just tedious artchat recalling similar art or artists, concocting playful tales, realizing how scrap metal was repurposed into art, making judgments about the artist's intentions or character, or contemplating an artwork's provenance, price, politics. Let the artwork stand on its own. Walk around fast and slow, be still, look and see from
up down sideways close afar above below
, enjoy the multiplicity ofsilhouettes shadows dapples clouds airspaces sun earth glowing
. Your only language is vision.Lists consist of whatever it takes
Lists consist of whatever it takes – nouns, proper nouns, verbs, graphics, images, numbers.
...In lists, spaces have meaning, locating elements in relation to other elements. Lists are often free and independent from conventional rules of stylesheets / grammar / typography / punctuation. Lists also help us escape from the personal internalized mash-up stylesheets of every writer and reader – a continuous low-level background buzz checking to see if word usage, spelling, punctuation, grammar are 'correct'. Lists are all content – about the substance contained, not the container. An empirical theory here for reasoning about lists includes
selection of list items
list quality and completeness
comparing list models
comparing list architecturesNo wonder you think it's complicated
We were very proud of our user interface and the fact that we had a way to browse 16,000 (!!) pages of documentation on a CD-ROM. But browsing the hierarchy felt a little complicated to us.
So we asked Tufte to come in and have a look, and were hoping perhaps for a pat on the head or some free advice. He played with our AnswerBook for 90 seconds, turned around, pronounced his review:
"Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care is a best-selling owner's manual for the most complicated 'product' imaginable – and it has only 2 levels of headings. You have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven't stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it's complicated."
Verb List
Documents vs. decks
Decks are easier to prepare than documents, however. Documents require coherence, thinking, sentences. But convenience in preparing decks harms the content and the audience. Optimizing presenter convenience is selfish, lazy, and worst of all, replaces thinking.
Books are meant to be used
During most of the course students have their books open, either to read or to follow along. Students are encouraged to annotate the books: "Books are meant to be used. Dog-ear the pages, mark them up, put notes in the spacious margins."
Learning via teaching
The course material changes 15% each year, as the book currently in progress becomes part of the course years before it is finally published. I detect incoherencies and mistakes in the new material while teaching. This leads to refinements or even throwing stuff out from the forthcoming book. A good way to learn about something is to teach it.
Self-publishing, self-exemplifying
I sought to design [my first book] so as to make it self-exemplifying – that is, the physical object itself would reflect the intellectual principles advanced in the book. Publishers seemed appalled at the prospect that an author might govern design. Consequently I decided to self-publish the book.
...[Howard Gralla and I] spent the summer in his studio laying out the book, page by page. We integrated graphics into the text, sometimes in the middle of sentences, eliminating the usual segregation of text and image – one of the ideas Visual Display advocated.
My view on self-publishing was to go all out, to make the best and most elegant and wonderful book possible, without compromise. Otherwise, why do it? The next 4 books were financed by the previous books. I have never written a grant application.
A history of content and sources
Not all that many readers go to the back matter and look up the source for a single sentence. But the back matter can also be read as ordinary text, revealing a history of content and sources. And images and illustrations from the book in the back matter create a lovely visual/verbal summary quilt of the entire book, enjoyed by all.