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Episode 146—Austin Kleon: Steal, Show, and Keep Going!
175 Plays6 years ago
"Maybe the world will aways be crazy, and creative work will always be hard. Then the question becomes: How do you keep going?" says Austin Kleon.
This is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, producers, and podcasters about the art and craft of telling true stories.
Austin Kleon is the author of Newspaper Blackout, Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, The Steal Like an Artist Journal, and his latest book is Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod.
Thanks to our sponsors in Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction for helping make today's show possible.
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Transcript
Perseverance in Creative Work
00:00:00
Speaker
maybe the world will always be crazy and creative work will always be hard. And then the question becomes, how do you keep going? Whoa, the red light, the red light's blinking.
00:00:13
Speaker
So, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher Colleges, Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two-year, low-residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on-campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have Pulitzer Prizes and bestselling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni, which has published
00:00:40
Speaker
140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit Goucher.edu slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA in nonfiction. That all sounds good, right? Hit it.
00:01:13
Speaker
Right. Yes. Oh, yeah.
Introduction to Austin Kleon
00:01:17
Speaker
Wow. So Austin Kleon is on the show this week. Oh, boy. If you're listening to this in the Pacific Northwest, specifically the Portland area, Austin will be at Powell's on April 11th. I'm going. At least I better be going. Oh, well, are you here for the first time in this digital safe space?
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah? How are you? I'm sort of hungry right now. Well, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, producers, and podcasters about the art and craft of telling true stories. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, all the usual places.
00:01:59
Speaker
Please subscribe and we'll certainly head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter.
AWP Portland Experiences
00:02:08
Speaker
Once a month, no spam, can't beat that. I went to AWP last week, the writer industrial complex and was up in Portland and met lots of people, IRL, in real life.
00:02:21
Speaker
that have been on the show. Allison Williams, Donna Tallarico, Jeff Geiger, Gene Guerrero, Rebecca Fish Ewan, Lee Gutkind, Hattie Fleischer, Fleischer, Fleischer, sorry Hattie, had a significant amount of beer with Donna and her husband Kevin one night, played some board games at a board game bar,
00:02:42
Speaker
I got lost at one point. I was walking the wrong direction in Portland for about 30 minutes before I realized I was heading north instead of south at about 2 a.m. Got my 10,000 steps though.
00:02:57
Speaker
Hey, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is also sponsored by Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction, Discover Your Story. Bay Path University, founded in New England in 1897, is the first and only university to offer a no-residency, fully accredited MFA, focusing exclusively on creative nonfiction.
00:03:18
Speaker
attend full or part-time from anywhere in the world. In the Bay Path MFA, you'll find small online classes and a dynamic, supportive community. You'll master the techniques of good writing from acclaimed authors and editors, learn about publishing and teaching through professional internships, and complete a master's thesis that will form the foundation for your memoir or collection of personal essays.
00:03:42
Speaker
Special elective courses include contemporary women's studies, travel and food writing, family histories, spares writing, and an optional week-long summer residency in Ireland, with guest writers including Andre Debeest III, Anne Hood, Mia Gallagher, and others.
00:03:58
Speaker
Start dates in late August, February. Start dates in late August, January. It's January and May. Find out more at baypath.edu slash MFA.
Insights from 'Keep Going'
00:04:15
Speaker
So yes, Austin Kleon is here. He's a writer who draws, man. And the author of Newspaper Blackout, Steel Like an Artist, Show Your Work, The Steel Like an Artist Journal, and latest, his latest, Keep Going. 10 ways to stay creative in good times and bad. And it is badass, as they say.
00:04:37
Speaker
We talked about his time in libraries, researching in public, how his books talk to each other, and so much more. He's a machine, man. Head over to AustinClean.com for tour dates, subscribe to his newsletter. It's the best in the biz. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at AustinClean and listen to him right here, right now, like right now. Go.
Library Influence on Creativity
00:05:09
Speaker
Um, my time in, in the library is becoming even more meaningful and more significant as time goes on. Like I've really started realizing how much that shaped me right from the get go. And it, and it makes me wonder how like the randomness of your first kind of real job.
00:05:33
Speaker
how that like sets you off on a path later. Like I'm kind of interested in that now because so much of what I learned at the reference desk I use now in my own work and it's sort of like, it's stuff that you would expect like when you're a reference librarian and you learn how to Google really quickly and you learn how to research and find information really
00:05:59
Speaker
efficiently and quickly. But then there's also stuff like I learned a lot about just what it was like to be a reader at the library, how many people come to books for different things and how many different kinds of readers there are. And I think that working in a library gave me a real sense of what books circulate and what
00:06:27
Speaker
books don't and how, you know, being popular isn't necessarily good and being good is not necessarily popular. And I think it was a good exercise in learning how kind of ephemeral the whole publishing process really is in some ways, but then how long lasting it can be too. One thing librarians aren't supposed to talk about a lot is the
00:06:57
Speaker
the process of weeding that goes on and what weeding is is when you go through the collection at the library and you decide which books stay and which books go and that was a real humbling experience like the first time I had to like see what a favorite novel of mine like how many times it had or hadn't gone out
00:07:18
Speaker
versus like a tattered Danielle Steele novel. And that was just like a really good education as a young writer.
Commercial Success vs. Creative Freedom
00:07:28
Speaker
It was the best job I could have hoped for. And I think that underscores a key point that if you have talent either as an illustrator or a painter or a writer, you know, fill in the blank, it almost doesn't matter how good you are unless you're willing to make the kind of work that people want to consume on some level.
00:07:49
Speaker
Yeah. Being a librarian taught me a lot about genre and it taught me like one of the things like the cliched wisdom is you can never judge a book by its cover. That's the exact opposite of what you learn as a librarian is that you can very quickly actually judge a book by its cover. Like you can find out exactly what genre it's in or where it should be shelved or you know that kind of thing. You learn so much about publishing.
00:08:19
Speaker
and and what books are and I think It's it's true that you know, you can be a very talented person But if you don't find a good place to kind of insert your talent you just don't get the breaks and the and the audience that you might necessarily have otherwise and you know if you had told me that I would have been shelved and self-help when I was
00:08:49
Speaker
20, I think I probably would have laughed at you or, you know, but, um, it's been interesting how self-help and the illustrated gift book were these genres that I didn't really know existed. But once I found them, they became these formats in which I could kind of create the kind of weird illustrated books that I really loved and wanted to do.
00:09:19
Speaker
And so I feel like one of the gifts of my career right now is that I'm working in a very commercial genre and that allows me to be really weird with format and the actual structure of the books. And so I find that to be a really fun place to be where you can write books that people actually read, but allow you to be as weird as you kind of want to.
00:09:46
Speaker
There's a great punk rock DIY ethos to your books, too. They're easily consumable, but they're extremely actionable in a lot of ways, too. I'm always running a colored pencil under so many of these passages and then citing the quotes that you cite and everything. Where does that DIY ethos for you come from?
00:10:14
Speaker
First of all, I'm really happy that you picked up on that because I have always felt like for me, the books were fancy zines. Like I really wanted them to be fancy zines. I wanted them to feel like something that was almost like photocopied at a Kinko's in the middle of the night. You know, like I I want them to kind of have I want them to be like polished fancy zines basically to have that kind of immediacy and to feel like
00:10:43
Speaker
they were made from the same hand. I think that's something that is really important to me is that even though I have a great editor and a great book designer who I work with, I really get to have my hands on every page of these books and I'm deeply involved in the design process.
00:11:09
Speaker
That's like super important to me. And, and, you know, the DIY element just came from, I mean, I am a big, I'm, I'm a big punk rock
DIY Punk Rock Ethos in Design
00:11:19
Speaker
fan. I think I've internalized a lot of the lessons of that kind of DIY ethos. And I, I'm a guy who I'm happy about running a one man show kind of, you know, like I like to keep
00:11:37
Speaker
I want to have my fingers in whatever has my name on it. These books, I really do think of them as just fancy zines. I feel like I that were assembled at some really, really fancy Kinko's in the middle of the night.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah, in your first two books, they seem to come out of a place of hope in a lot of ways. And I feel like Keep Going seems to come out of more of a place of desperation, given sort of a current climate where everything just feels like it's under attack. And I wonder if that kind of rings true with you at all. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, still like an artist and show your work where
00:12:26
Speaker
And they were, they were like my sons. They were kind of born in optimistic time. I mean, it's funny cause my, my son Owen is about as old as, as still like an artist. And my son Jules is just a little bit younger than show your work, but they were, you know, those books were written in optimistic times and they were optimistic about, they were really optimistic about the internet and the internet's potential to kind of launch yourself into the kind of
00:12:55
Speaker
collective consciousness of the world or whatever you want to say, the internet's ability to gain an audience.
Origins and Themes of 'Keep Going'
00:13:04
Speaker
I think Keep Going comes from a more, I would hope it was a more mature point, but Keep Going is a book that came out of two things happening at once for me.
00:13:20
Speaker
One, I was watching all my artists and creative type friends kind of lose their minds over the kind of political climate and also just the onslaught of social media and the way like we've all just kind of become phone junkies.
00:13:36
Speaker
But then also this feeling that, you know, I'd been doing this for over a decade now and my creative work didn't really seem to get any easier. Like every book is still a struggle and every project still feels like starting over with a blank page.
00:13:56
Speaker
So everything sort of got better for me once I realized like, hey, maybe things won't get better. Maybe the world will always be crazy and creative work will always be hard. And then the question becomes, how do you keep going? And so this was a book I really needed to read for myself. Like I really wanted this book to exist for me.
00:14:18
Speaker
And so I put together over the past couple of years, you know, this book that's supposed to be a pep talk that kind of, you know, when you're bottomed out or burned out or starting over or whatever, you know, keep going is supposed to be a corrective, a kind of pep talk that gives you back to like where you need to be.
00:14:39
Speaker
And to your point of the world being crazy, you write in the new book about even going back to Thoreau's day, the weekly newspaper was almost too much for him to absorb.
Influence of Thoreau's Journals
00:14:54
Speaker
Yes. I was reading a lot of Thoreau while I wrote this book and I was reading his journals, which I don't think, you know, I think most people, if they know Thoreau, they've had to read like Civil Disobedience or Walden in school.
00:15:09
Speaker
And the thing I really love about Thoreau's journals is it's really his kind of raw experience on the page. And he even wrote in his journal about how he wished he could just hand his journal to people because he felt like that was the real true expression of himself.
00:15:27
Speaker
I'm really fascinated by Thoreau because I think he gets this really bad rap as like a fuddy duddy. And I read Thoreau and it's like, you know, he's kind of over educated. He lives with his parents. He is really upset about the government. He really loves plants. He really sounds like a millennial to me. He sounds like a lot of my friends.
00:15:52
Speaker
And I found him when I was reading this book to be so I could relate to him so much. But, you know, Thoreau is in this like really tumultuous. He's living through this super tumultuous time in the country. You know, he's writing in the 1850s and things like the Fugitive Slave Act have passed and the country is really starting to come to a head. And he actually never, you know, made it to the Civil War. But he was living through this time of deep turmoil.
00:16:20
Speaker
And he was battling with the question of, like, how do I, as a writer, how do I stay engaged with, you know, the politics and the climate of my country, but also reclaim enough of my time to have the freedom and the headspace to do what I need to do? And he did. He was subscribed to a weekly newspaper.
00:16:50
Speaker
and he decided that that was just too much news for him, that it was taking him away too much from his everyday life. But yeah, Thoreau was kind of a guardian spirit with this book, for sure. I shouldn't say what I said to your first two books, like I know newspaper blackout was your very first one, and the Steel Journal kind of bridged show your work in the latest one, but I kind of, I said the first two books because in a lot of ways I feel like
00:17:19
Speaker
steal like an artist and show your work and then keep going are like really a trilogy of sorts and I wonder if did do you see that keep going is kind of like your return of the Jedi and the third movie in this franchise of yours I I hope it's more like my last crusade you know I feel like steel is my Raiders of the Lost Ark I feel like show your work is is sort of
00:17:45
Speaker
some people feel like it's more of a temple of doom book because I feel like some people read I really love show your work and I think it's it was it was hell for me to write but it was it I feel like it turned out the way I wanted it to but
00:18:02
Speaker
Some people read Steel like an artist and it feels so fun and freeing. And then they read show your work and they're like, wait, you mean I have to do work now? Like, so it's, so sometimes I think for some people show your work as their temple of doom, but I wanted to keep going to really be my last crusade in a sense. And that like, it was, it both echoed the first book
00:18:26
Speaker
And the book after but it also kind of stood on its own and was a kind of ride into the sunset Feeling at the end of it and so I did think of them as a trilogy and I was trying to find trilogies that That I could kind of model off of but it's it's hard. It's hard finding good trilogies actually but especially
00:18:52
Speaker
My mind sort of tends to go towards movies. So I was like, oh, Indiana Jones or like, you know, Lord of the Rings or something. But I wanted this book to kind of stand on its own, but also definitely be part of the series. And weirdly enough, I think that this book, if you don't know, my work is actually the easiest entry point because I think it can be I think there's something about this book that
00:19:18
Speaker
makes it a little bit more accessible to all types of different people, like whether they're creative or not. Yeah, I can definitely see that. You can go any direction you want with them, which is kind of fun. And you can always, if you're in that kind of, say, self-promotional rut, you could be like, oh, show your work. That's how it reminds you how to do that. Or if you're kind of stuck in terms of maybe
00:19:43
Speaker
Just in a creative rut, maybe steal like an artist might give you that shot in the arm to be like, oh yeah, that's right I can go find more influence and and steal that influence to start making a better hole and then of course keep going is just Kind of that an engine thrust to give you that requisite push that you might need to kind of you know Put all those pieces together and maybe make something new. I like that I like that that way of putting it for sure I I do think they talk to each other though, and I I
00:20:11
Speaker
I definitely kind of saw them as my little box set. So I and they have the same format and everything. So I I feel happy. I've actually I think this is the first book that I've really felt on every page, like, OK, we really we we really did what we set out to do on this, like this really, you know, because because when Steel like an artist came out, I worked so quickly on it.
00:20:38
Speaker
And it was so fast and it was so just kind of blurted out of me that I really didn't think about it that much when I was doing it. You know, and then it was kind of this like surprise success and show your work was a book written under real duress. I actually wrote show your work. They were optimistic times, but I had a newborn and my son was really young and I was watching him part time. And so I don't really remember much of the writing of show your work. So,
00:21:09
Speaker
That's a funny book for me to dip back into because I'm like, oh, yeah, this part, I forgot about this. This is this is pretty good. Yeah. And keep going. Like I probably had the cushiest conditions, but existentially it was the most difficult. But.
00:21:29
Speaker
Hey, hey, what is the meaning of this? Well, I wanna say that this episode is also brought to you by my monthly newsletter. Oh yeah, that's right, on the first of the month, you can get a tasty bit of goodness sent right to your inbox. My reading recommendations for the month and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Visit BrendanBomera.com. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it.
00:21:57
Speaker
Now back to the show. Yeah, the books, I'm always amazed when I dip back into them how easy they are to read, how simple they come across, how simple the ideas, how so sort of coalesced the ideas are and all the quotes. But when I really boil it down, I'm like,
00:22:18
Speaker
There is a ton of work going on here to really squeeze out the most efficient use of every word and to thematically tie it into all the stuff that Austin is somehow curating from across the internet and the books he's reading. So what does that look like for you as you're pulling together all this information? How do you keep that straight so you can then access it in such a way that reads so fluidly? It's probably more haphazard than you would expect. I don't have like a great
00:22:48
Speaker
Like my friend Ryan holiday has this like really, he has this very, very disciplined, very thoughtful way of, of capturing stuff. What he does is he reads books and underlines just like I do, but then he goes through with index cards, like actual index cards and like transcribes all the passages that popped out at him. And then he kind of indexes them and they put some in this big file. So he has this like.
00:23:18
Speaker
gigantic commonplace book really of index cards in an actual box and what I do is much more scattershot than that is it's kind of like when I read I'm like underlining stuff and then some of it I copy into a notebook or I put in my diary but then a lot of it I'll like tweet out or put in a blog post or something like that so a lot of what I do is kind of research in public I'm kind of
00:23:48
Speaker
like sharing bits and pieces as I go. And then what's interesting about that is that people then send me more stuff to read as I'm going. So I'll share a quote that I love out of a book that I know I might want to use later, but then someone sends me a book that's even more interesting than that. And so I'm kind of like researching out in the open and even, you know, portions of these books,
00:24:16
Speaker
began as like tweets or blog posts, you know, and then they get kind of interpolated into the book. And so I've tried to be more like disciplined and orderly about my research, but there's just something I try
00:24:37
Speaker
really hard not to fight what works for me. I feel like that happens to us a lot in our creative careers. I feel like we achieve these job titles. You feel like, well, I'm a real author now, so I should work like a capital author works. But the thing that got me here is the way I naturally operate. And so I've tried to go just
00:25:07
Speaker
be like sort of trust the process as they say, just know that like bits and pieces over time will turn into something bigger. And so if I had to describe the way I work now, it's basically like I carry this pocket notebook with me all the time. And then I scribble stuff in that. And then every morning I write in a diary and that could be three to five to six to seven pages or whatever. And then I make a blog post every morning.
00:25:36
Speaker
that over time kind of turns into talks, which then turn into books like keep going was a talk before it was a before it was actually a book. And there's something about working in that kind of like bits and pieces over time way where it's like it starts out as like notes in a notebook or tweets and then it's like diary entries or blog posts and then it becomes like a talk and then it becomes like a fleshed out book. That's like just sort of the way I work.
00:26:06
Speaker
And I think that, um, you know, I was talking to someone else this week and they were like, I've always wondered if that would feel cheap for my audience that they'd be like, Oh, well I've already read some of like these little bits and snippets. Like I recognize these, but someone that I was talking to this week said, Oh, it's kind of thrilling to have seen you like go through these things in real time. And then for it to be like polished and fleshed out and like,
00:26:36
Speaker
all in this coherent package. I think people are much more forgiving now. When I first started doing books, it felt like people didn't want to pay for something that was online. And now it feels like if something has been well designed and curated and
00:26:57
Speaker
put together coherently, like you'll gladly pay 10 bucks to not have to sift through the internet. You know what I mean? It's almost like, uh, uh, well, you know, Oh, well you, you could probably find the nuggets of this on his blog, but who the hell wants to spend more time on the internet? So it's, it's this interesting thing. But one of the things that really, um, I was obsessed with while I was doing keep going was
Building a Sustainable Creative Practice
00:27:27
Speaker
I wanted to find a repeatable system for making work. Um, and that system I just described to you is sort of like me emulating Thoreau or in someone more contemporary, uh, David Sedaris. Um, because if you think about both those guys and they seem like strange like bedfellows or, or, or, you know, like strange to put together, but they both like,
00:27:54
Speaker
walked a bunch and they kept pocket notebooks and they kept daily diaries and then they turned those diaries into lectures or performances and then they collected those pieces into books. So there was that kind of like that same sort of process going on. I was just like really inspired by them when I did this book.
00:28:16
Speaker
And I think what that gets at too, and this is definitely a learned skill and I'd love to get your impressions on it, is cultivating a real sense of patience with your work. How have you learned to do that in such fast times? I have to say, I felt like I didn't have any until I had kids. And once I had children, I had to dig deep into my patience back.
00:28:47
Speaker
Uh, but, but kids sort of rearrange your idea of time too, because you kind of watch this thing growing over time and you just like get this whole new perspective. And I also think that I'm just like, I'm 35, so I'm not that old, but I do feel that kind of you're approaching.
00:29:11
Speaker
middle age, you know, I feel that like you're headed there. And I do think that, you know, once you start heading there, your perspective on time, you're like, instead of I haven't felt panicked, like, Oh, I don't have much time left. Like, I got to get to work. I've actually felt the opposite lately, where it's like,
00:29:35
Speaker
Well, you know, life expectancy wise, I probably I hope I live to 80. So I actually have a lot of time left. You know, if we go by statistics, granted, you know, the world could blow up or I could blow up or whatever. I might stick around for a while. How do I keep doing this? Then was my you know, you switch to like how not like
00:30:03
Speaker
I need to get things done now to how am I going to keep up this practice indefinitely? You know, because I really want to be an old working person. Like I want to be a David Hockney, you know, or a Bill Cunningham when he was alive or a Joan Rivers, you know, like I want to be one of these people that still does really great work into their 80s or 90s, you know, like I really want to keep doing this indefinitely.
00:30:30
Speaker
So, um, I just realized like, I need a system. I need like a daily practice that will pull me through my days and through this, whatever career I get and whatever lifespan I get. And like, I just, I just, it became clear to me that, that to have this kind of day by day approach was a sustainable way of working.
00:30:55
Speaker
You know, I think when I was younger, I was more about those like quick bursts, like get things done. And now I'm like, how do I sustain my energy over time? Like spoken like a true tired parent. What is my endurance level? How do I sustain this?
00:31:13
Speaker
Yeah, I've heard you talk about with with respect to productivity and hacking and how nauseating that is and it sounds like it sounds like you're you know the ultimate hack I hate that word but it's just like kind of slowing slowing down and being okay playing playing the long game with it and like securing as you write in the latest book you know your bliss station and that can be a physical or a temporal place
00:31:41
Speaker
Yes, the bliss station was one of my, you know, I'm very skeptical actually of Joseph Campbell's follow your bliss. I think follow there's a great New Yorker cartoon that has a guy standing on the street and he's holding a cardboard sign and it says followed my bliss. And so I'm actually kind of skeptical of Campbell's like assertion that everyone should follow their bliss because just because I think it gets like
00:32:09
Speaker
misinterpreted by people but the one thing I unquestionably love is his idea of a bliss station and that is like a place or a time in which you completely disconnect from the world to connect with yourself and he said there has to be like a certain place or a certain time of day where nobody knows like where you are or you don't know what your friends are up to you don't know what the world is up to
00:32:40
Speaker
you're just there to sort of experience and become and to make things and to kind of have those blissful moments. And that was really powerful to me. And I think that everyone, you know, needs to have these little bliss stations in their life, just a place that's just for you where you kind of reconnect
00:33:06
Speaker
and disconnect enough from the world that you can connect with yourself, basically.
00:33:13
Speaker
And there's another great moment in the book, too, and this is a quote I had read from Mike Brabigula when he was writing these New York Times columns, and you cited it perfectly in the book that you don't necessarily, you know, maybe you're not supposed to be an artist, and you know, and he says, you know, you might be meant to teach kids or raise money for a food bank, you know, don't rule out quitting. There's going to be an insane amount of work ahead, and your time might be better spent elsewhere.
00:33:39
Speaker
And, you know, why do you think, you know, embedded in that is like, why do you think so many people want to make their living as an artist or feel like their art needs to somehow sustain themselves? I don't know. I mean, Adam Phillips, the psychologist and the writer, he talks really beautifully about
00:33:59
Speaker
how sometimes art is more of a problem for people than a solution. Like there are a lot of people who become artists who really should have done something else. Like the art life kind of led them down into this dark place, you know? And I don't know. I mean, I think there's a lot of myth buildup around the artist. You know, I think it gets, you know, our notions of fame and celebrity kind of get,
00:34:27
Speaker
mixed in there and I think that people think that I've been really interested in fame in the past couple of years and and there's a great guy named Shep Gordon Shep Gordon and there was a documentary about him that Michael Mike Myers produced called Super Minch and Shep Gordon's job was to make people famous as an agent. He was Alice Cooper's agent
00:34:55
Speaker
But what's so beautiful about the documentary is that he talks about how toxic fame is and how fame doesn't really have any true value on its own. He says that, you know, most people who get famous are trying to fill a hole somehow and they've quickly realized that fame won't fill it. And it probably just rips it open bigger. And I think that's why like sort of rewriting
00:35:23
Speaker
a lot of the myths around artists and to start thinking of artists as people who do things to kind of, you know, repitch art as a verb and not a noun.
00:35:36
Speaker
And to get people to kind of forget about the noun, to forget about being an artist or forget about being a writer. Think about what you want to actually do, you know, because you you bump into all kinds of people like that, particularly in like creative writing workshops, you know, bump into people who like they really, really want to be a writer, but they don't want to do any writing. You know, they don't want to actually write. And I think that that happens a lot with
00:36:05
Speaker
kids too. Even at a young age, what do adults often ask kids? They ask them, what do you want to be when you grow up? People ask you that question from a very early age. I'm just really interested in what is it that you like to do? What are your verbs? What are the things that
00:36:27
Speaker
really make you feel alive and make you feel like you're contributing something. Focus on them and forget about the nouns for a little bit. Because I think when you focus on your verbs, when you focus on what you truly feel like you're good at and you love to do, that will take you further than chasing after some noun or some job title.
00:36:53
Speaker
And that's something I've been thinking a lot about lately. It's just like, how do we refocus our lives on the verbs of living rather than the nouns?
00:37:04
Speaker
And there's another moment too where, well actually this is in Manjula Martin's great book, Scratch. And there's a moment in there where you said, it's almost like be careful what you wish for. Like when your art becomes your bread winning and that can really, it can drag you down. And I feel like this was probably in and around that time show your work had come out and maybe you were still reflecting on the time and how painful that book was to write.
00:37:34
Speaker
How do you pull yourself or resuscitate your creative energy out of that once you've been burned out by it? By by an art that's become your application Well, I think that play is So important for the artist like there really needs to be some time Where you do not worry about the results of what you're doing. Like I think that when art becomes a
00:38:02
Speaker
or writing or whatever the passion is becomes the job. There needs to be time that it's not work, that it's just play. And there needs to be time built in where you're just futzing around, like you're just playing and you're doing things for no good reason at all. You know, like as a writer right now, for me,
00:38:29
Speaker
There's always something for me to do, you know, like I could be writing a blog post or I could be like, you know, answering an email or I could be writing a speech or, you know, I could be doing all these things that demonstratively make me money. But there needs to be time in my day where I sit down and I'm not doing it for any other reason, but to see what happens.
00:38:57
Speaker
And so for me right now, that's what my diary is. Like my diary is a place where I sit down and I practice what it is that I do, which is right, but I do it in a way where I'm not interested in the results. I don't really care about the results. I only want the process. And that is kind of the way I think to make sure you don't fall too far off the path. But I also think there's different, there's other techniques like, um, I
00:39:26
Speaker
I'm a big fan of kind of doing things for non market reasons. Like when, when professionalism sort of takes over, I think it's time to kind of get amateur again, you know? And so one of the things I love to do is I love to make stuff for specific people, you know? And that just happens to be right now, the easiest people to do that for are my kids. So,
00:39:55
Speaker
I love to just make a piece of art for my son, Owen. For a while we were trading, he was really into robots, so I would make him a robot, I would collage a robot from magazines, and then he would draw me a robot, and we would just kind of trade back and forth for a while. And there was something so pure and good about that exercise that it actually led me to other work, because I was like, oh, I found this little
00:40:24
Speaker
tape and magazine technique that worked well for these robots. Maybe I could use it for this other stuff. You know what I mean? So I also think that like once you turn your hobby into a profession, unfortunately, I think you have to find another hobby. For me, music is something I keep nonprofessional in my life, like playing music. And so when I sit down to the piano,
00:40:51
Speaker
The piano asks nothing of me other than my touch, you know, it just doesn't and my attention and it gives back so much more. Owen and I, my oldest, we actually make music together and we actually made a song for the book trailer and I even started to worry like, is this too professional? Should we not be doing this? Should we not be using a piece of music that we made for fun?
00:41:18
Speaker
for the book trailer but I thought it fit really well and I wanted to I wanted to do it so but I think the essential difference there is that we didn't make it specifically for the book trailer it's just like a piece of music that we made that I thought would be really good for the book trailer but we didn't make it to like you know to have music for the trailer you know and I think that's the difference but I think of it too in terms of like
00:41:44
Speaker
If you wanted to get kind of corporate with it, it would be like R and D, you know, and a good company. Like you need like a lab of people who are just kind of like messing around and trying to come up with weird stuff that you can turn into products later, you know. So there needs to be some good R and D time, even if you're to use Paul Jarvis's, he calls it a company of one, you know, even if you're a company of one,
00:42:15
Speaker
You know, you still need that R and D time and you need that time to not know what's going to happen. And I think that's really a big message that I've kind of figured out is that like when you there's so much out there right now as like, if you're a creative, you have to be a brand like you have to be your own brand or whatever.
Balancing Brand and Creativity
00:42:36
Speaker
And you better be on brand. Yes. And I find this very depressing because it
00:42:42
Speaker
You're asking a person to be a brand and to have to be on brand all the time. The problem with that is, if you really want to develop or experiment or push yourself at all, you have to be off brand every once in a while. If you're constantly worried about being on brand, when do you do that really weird, interesting work that'll get you to the next place?
00:43:11
Speaker
That's a good case for doing things in private and not sharing. Um, so yeah, these are all like really interesting questions. And I, I, I think what I'm getting more comfortable with is that they're unsolvable, that you don't actually ever solve these questions. You just grapple with them and the grappling kind of provides the meaning for the work.
00:43:36
Speaker
Over the course of your writing career, starting with newspaper blackout and then of course progressing through your five publishable, your five books essentially, how have you processed going from relative obscurity to someone who has an audience and a pretty big audience and people listen to you? How have you processed that over the last eight years or eight to 10 years or so?
Fame and Maintaining Creativity
00:44:04
Speaker
Well, I think my first impulse is to is to quote the Rolling Stone writers when Rolling Stone first took off. I think they said to each other, oh, no, people are watching now. Let's pretend they're not. Yeah. And and I but but I know like on a personal level that that's
00:44:30
Speaker
your audience and you could try to ignore it as much as you can but like you're in a different place now and so you might have to operate in a different way. I will say that like I am most interesting and most productive and most creative when I don't try to operate like anyone else or I don't operate on shoulds you know I don't
00:44:59
Speaker
And what I mean by that is, again, like after show your work came out and I was like an author with a capital A and like a speaker and stuff, I just felt like, for example, to give you a really concrete thing, I stopped posting to my blog every day. I only posted to my blog and my website when I had some kind of like good, like sort of like helpful essay, you know, that I thought everyone would really like, you know, um,
00:45:29
Speaker
And it, what it meant was, is that like, I was always worried when I went to post something on my blog, I was like, is this good enough to share? Like, will people like this or what, you know, that kind of thing. And what happened about two years ago is I said, you know what, this is, this is everything against what I've always recommended to people. This is, this is operating in a way that is completely
00:45:59
Speaker
you know, it's not only sort of arbitrary, it's stifling. So I was like, why don't I go back to what I how I used to do it, which is like every day, you just make a blog post. I was like, what would happen if I just started blogging again every day? And I just started doing that again. And the amazing thing happened that happens in this book called Art and Fear. They talk about this pottery class where the
00:46:30
Speaker
teacher gave the potters, the students an assignment and half of the class, their job was to try to come up with the best pot they could possibly make. And the other half of the class, their assignment was simply make as many pots as they could. And at the end of the class, the teacher compared all the student work.
00:46:53
Speaker
And I think how it happened was that the, the students who were supposed to just make as many pots as they could, they actually came up with more and better pots than the people whose only job was to produce one like perfect pot. And you know, whether that's apocryphal or true or not, it certainly feels right to me, which is in the act of like simply trying to do a blog post every day.
00:47:20
Speaker
I strike gold more often now with the entries than I did when I just sat down to try to make like a great entry, you know? So there's, there's something about that repetitive process of just coming back and trying and doing things over and over again, that it just leads to more and better work. And that is, that was like, um, but again, that's, that's,
00:47:46
Speaker
you're operating in a way where you're like, well, you're, you're like a fancy author now. You're just going to give away a blog post every day. You know what I mean? Um, and, but the more I kind of, to go back to that kind of punk rock spirit that you talked about in the books, the more I kind of operate in that original mode of what I wanted to do, which was just,
00:48:11
Speaker
have a place to connect with the world I wanted to connect to. Like that was what my website was, is I kind of wanted to join in the fun, you know, and kind of invent myself. The more I, it's, it's about like using the web as a self invention machine rather than a self promotion machine, you know? So the more I operate in a way that's natural to me, I think the better the work is. And it's just like, it's one of those,
00:48:41
Speaker
So one of the things that really makes me crazy about life is you have to discover the cliched wisdom for yourself through your own experiences. I hate how inefficient that is.
00:48:55
Speaker
I think that's something that our culture is waking up to right now is that life is not about efficiency, you know, it's about meaning. But with your blogging every day or putting out a newsletter every week, you know, you're going to strike gold more often. And what underscores that is that you have to be comfortable writing through, writing bad words to get the good words, right? Absolutely. Like you're going to have an off week, you're going to have an off day.
00:49:24
Speaker
And you know what? It's great. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Like you did a bog post that you didn't like. Don't share it on Twitter or don't push it out anywhere. Just let it sit. And the people who read you through like RSS or something, they'll just be like, eh, you know, like no one really cares. Like that is, that is something that my friend, um, I think that was Jessica Hagee who said that, like my friend Jessica was just like,
00:49:51
Speaker
The best thing that young artists should know is that no one cares like and that should be liberating for you that no one's watching that closely No one cares like just go for it And I still have to remind myself of that, you know, even with an audience I'm like look, you know like every week it's funny because I put out the weekly newsletter and I
00:50:17
Speaker
Every week there's some post I don't link to in the newsletter because I'm like, let's just let that post get pushed down over time. Who cares? And with the newsletter is something I wanted to touch upon too because I love it so much. It's one of the highlights of my week every Friday when you push that out.
00:50:34
Speaker
Yeah, and what was your original sort of vision for the newsletter?
Value of Austin Kleon's Newsletter
00:50:41
Speaker
What were you reading at the time that kind of informed what you would turn into your own thing that you have since put out every week for years now? I have a friend named Hugh MacLeod, and he wrote a great book called Ignore Everybody, which was an influence on Steel Like an Artist. And his alter ego online is gaping void.
00:51:02
Speaker
And Hugh, I want to say either half a decade ago or maybe even a decade ago, um, was one of the first people I saw really experimenting with the, um, email newsletters. And at one point he told me that his newsletter was the size of South by Southwest. Basically he was like, okay, take all the people that go to South by Southwest. Like that's my newsletter.
00:51:28
Speaker
And he did this brilliant thing where he put this newsletter out. And then at the top of every newsletter was a art print that people could buy. So he basically like had this incredible business just by putting this newsletter out. So I was interested in as, as a greasy, it began as almost like a greasy marketing thing. Like I was like, Oh, well newsletters, that's, that's a, that's interesting. Um, but, uh, what happened over time?
00:51:58
Speaker
Is I kind of hit when I first started putting out a newsletter. I think it was right in between Steal like an artist and show your work and People weren't as blown out on social media as they are now But the newsletter eventually like at first it wasn't very good It was kind of like half-hazard and it wasn't it really hadn't it was really when I hit on the list of ten that
00:52:28
Speaker
all of a sudden it was like, it became much looser and it freed me up to make the newsletter more like what my blog used to be. Like when I first started blogging, they weren't like well thought out blog posts. They were like, it was almost like a link blog or something. And so the newsletter freed me up to be more of myself for subscribers. So like,
00:52:53
Speaker
I would link to my own stuff, and then I'd link to what I was reading, but then I'd drop in like, oh, I watched this movie and really liked it, or then I listened to this music this week that I really loved. It let me be more of a whole well-rounded person, and I found that really liberating, and it felt like the more eclectic I was in the newsletter, the more people liked it, which just always surprises me.
00:53:22
Speaker
I think that is an interesting thing for me. I've noticed over time that sometimes I start something and it doesn't have the best intentions. Like it's, it, it starts out as like a marketing device, like, Oh, well, get everybody's email and I'll send out something for free every week. And then I'll sell them a book whenever it's, you know, um, but it actually, like, I think if you have a creative spirit and you spend that much time on something every week,
00:53:52
Speaker
You trick yourself into it becoming actually this very, this thing that you love that you really look forward to. You know, like if someone put a gun to my head and they were like, you can, you can only keep one of your online things. Like which one would it be? I would absolutely say my weekly newsletter because it's the most fun I have.
00:54:15
Speaker
You know, and I, I look forward to Thursdays now because Thursday afternoons, when I put the newsletter together and I love it because it's so like clear what I need to do. I need to put out a good newsletter, you know, and it helps me kind of check in with my life every week.
00:54:32
Speaker
You know, I get to like look back through my journal and like my date book and look back through my Twitter and stuff and like, well, where are you into this week? Like what spoke to you? And I noticed patterns and stuff like that, you know, so it's like this really, you know, you start something thinking it's just going to get you, you know, grab eyeballs or whatever. And that becomes this very like this thing that's really near and dear to you, you know, and, um,
00:55:00
Speaker
I love that. I love being surprised by that process and, but it, yeah, that's how it, that's how it got started.
00:55:07
Speaker
Oh, that's great. 20 minutes later, sorry. No, that's amazing. It informs the one, I put out a monthly one and it's similar in form to yours. From a place of generosity and value to people for offering their time and their attention, which is like the ultimate currency these days. So it's like you wanna make sure that they're getting something for it.
00:55:34
Speaker
Yeah I mean you I mean that's just old writerly wisdom right like you want to be a good date like you just want to be a good date and I'm not gonna rag on anyone in particular but like I just like I pick up these books and it's just I mean I'll pick up a book like Susan Orleans the library book and she just like rips out of the gate and it's like just it's long and it's great and you're just like wow and then like some of the business books you pick up you're just like
00:56:04
Speaker
there's like some 10 page introduction and you're just like, was the, are you trying to bore me to death? You know what I mean? Like it's just so, it feels sometimes like, like that's, you know, like I just, the reader, books are about serving the reader, you know, like I, when people pick up my books or click open the newsletter even, it's like, yes, I have these things that I want to say and I have things to give you, but like,
00:56:32
Speaker
I want this to be fun and I want you not to be bored. Like if you're bored, I failed. Don't be boring.
00:56:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's ultimately what your work does so well is that it is just it's playful and fun and just by reading a couple pages it kind of it almost gives you that runners high if you're a runner and and it does give you that extra energy a little nudges say like yeah you know go out there and go out there and make something bad make it make something shitty and yeah and then and then just you know play with it you know have fun don't be so earnest you know this is fun we get to do this
00:57:12
Speaker
Yeah, we get to the should be fun and that and you know that that really, I mean, and I feel that very deeply about books. I don't think books should be a slog. You know, like, I mean, even even at its most whaley.
00:57:29
Speaker
like Moby Dick is awesome. I don't find it to be that much of a slog if you can really get into it, but even if you don't, then go find some other book that was written for you. Life is just too short to not be jazzed by what you're reading. The whole point of books is they're supposed to activate what's inside us and help us
00:58:00
Speaker
grow and become who we're going to be. I think a lot of times, I don't think books actually tell you something that you don't know sometimes. I think a lot of the books that are the closest to us are books that articulate something that was already inside us that we just hadn't found the words for.
00:58:22
Speaker
And I hear that a lot, and that's the best compliment that I get from a lot of people. They say, you said what I'd been thinking. I just couldn't come up with the words for it. Because those are the books that really mean something to people. Well, and where can people find you online if they're not already familiar with your work, Austin? It's super easy. Just go to austincleon.com, and you'll just
00:58:48
Speaker
There's more of me there than you even need. How amazing was that? Rhetorical question. But it was amazing, wasn't it? I've been a big fan of his for years. He's got it going on. And to get to talk to him was a total thrill. So go check him out on his book tour. His talks are amazing. His books are amazing.
00:59:13
Speaker
Buy one for yourself, and a friend, or a couple friends. It's very worth it, man. Thanks to Austin, of course, and thanks to Goucher's MFA, and Nonfiction, and Bay Path University's MFA, and Creative Nonfiction, for making this show possible.
00:59:28
Speaker
Keep the conversation going on Twitter. I'm at Brendan O'Maren at CNF pod there on Instagram at Brendan O'Maren at CNF pod. Getting real creative here. Facebook's the creative nonfiction podcast. Find it anywhere. What's that? Let's connect. I'd love to do a CNF and mailbag.
00:59:46
Speaker
Send an email to creativenonfictionpodcast.gmail.com, and I'll read some of that on the air. I think this would be kind of fun. I want to pull you CNF-ers into the fray. You're on the sidelines, man. Jump in the fire. Is that it? Oh, oh, yes. Share with a friend. You, as you know, you are the social network. Rage against the algorithm. Email to your network or share on social. Tag me in the show so I can give you a digital fist bump or the devil horns.
01:00:16
Speaker
Is that it? That and now it's it. Now it is definitely it. So remember man, if you can't do interview, see ya.