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Austin Kleon on Writing, Creativity and the Importance of Idleness

Metadata

  • Author: Not Overthinking
  • Full Title: Austin Kleon on Writing, Creativity and the Importance of Idleness
  • Category: #Type/Highlight/Podcast
  • URL: https://www.airr.io/episode/5fa968fde59866046ac2782c

Highlights

  • Speaker 0: the the impact of having a daily blawg. Um, I think for me what is interesting about having ah, blawg or some sort of daily project, even if it’s like I post one thing to instagram every day or, you know, just something little like that, having something that you have to do every day you find out it’s not that you have something to say. It’s that you find out what you have to say. So that’s so like writing every day. Some people say, Oh, you must have so much to say because you write every day and like actually it’s the opposite. I have more to say because I sit down and write every day and I figure out what I’m thinking and what it actually is that I have to say. So writing is actually not just a way of communicating with the world. It’s actually a way of communicating with yourself because the simple act of sitting down in front of a keyboard for 45 minutes or pulling out your notebook for a half hour, whatever it is, you are creating space in the day for you to kinda connect with up with what’s here and to figure out what’s going on. And what is it that I really feel on. What is it that I really think you know? And I think that’s a really That’s something that the beginner has to get over very quickly. Is that this idea like, well, I don’t have anything to say. What am I gonna block about? It’s like the pressure and the routine and the muscles of blogging everyday means that you will get to something every day, and and I have to say I’m someone who doesn’t necessarily practice what I preach right now. I’m actually I’m in a weird I write every day. I write privately every day, like in my diary and stuff, but I don’t actually blawg every day anymore, and I can actually tell I am less creatively fertile right now because I don’t have that practice because there’s something, ah, switch that happens when you know that people are going to read it. It brings up your kind of the level of things. You know, it’s it’s a kind of it brings things up. I think (TimeĀ 0:22:35)
  • Note: Developing the practice of writing
  • Speaker 0: because, man, there’s always something more interesting to do than right. I mean, they’re like putting air in the tires, like cleaning out your closet or rearranging your books or, you know, doing your taxes. My taxes Never. I’m working on a book. My taxes get done like so quickly It’s always something you’d rather do than right. It’s even the great writers, you know? I mean, there are some writers that you know they love it and they’re really good at. But you know David Rakoff, you know, he said, I’ll try to tone this down for YouTube But he said, You know, writing is like pulling teeth from my genitals, you know, just like it’s like it’s the work, you know. And Rakoff said, This really brilliant thing to where he was like, You know, writing is like engineering a meal out of rotten food because it always starts his crap like your your thoughts or just this, just like just this mass of junk. And, you know, it’s like it’s like trying to make a meal out of spoiled stuff from the garbage. Yeah, it’s just like, you know, it’s just but I think of it as a refinement process. I think of it is like, uh, you’ve got all this raw sludge and you’ve got to kind of run it through a machine several times and refined, and that’s what the that’s like, what the editing process is, right? You just got the sludge and this Mass, and you’re just you’re just constantly reshaping it and sharpening it and all that stuff. So it’s (TimeĀ 0:30:45)
  • Note: The challenge of writing
  • Speaker 0: so like, sort of pressure to specialize now. But I really think keeping things in your life, staying passionate about two or three things and letting them speak to each other, it just it makes the whole thing richer. And I really do think that if you can get over that initial problem of, like what to do with myself, you know, because that was really the thing when I was starting out. It’s like I would go to, like, a new job or something. I’d be like, Well, I’m into this, this and this and they’d be like, Well, we just need a copywriter. Dude, what do you Which one? You know, But if you can get past that, that that first top of it, the life that you get is so much richer and so much more meaningful. (TimeĀ 0:46:23)
  • Note: Specialism vs Generalist
  • Speaker 0: way more of them. And there’s a great there’s a great story in art and fear the book Art and fear. Where there’s this, you know, there’s this pottery class and half the class has said is told you will be evaluated on how many pots you make, how many pots you throw that is where your grade will come through from. The other part of the class was told, you will be evaluated on the quality of the final pot you make. Well, it turns out that the people in the group that was told to make his made pots is they could ended up with better quality pots than the ones that were told Toe just focus on quality. So, like there’s something about quantity and frequency and blogging that I think leads to better stuff overall than if I just sat and waited for, like, this perfect post, and I could tell you that’s happening to me right now and there are two big posts I want to write and I’m just, like, trying to figure out Well, I’ve waited this long now, so it’s gonna have to be really good. Whereas if my dumb ass had just written about the stuff as I was thinking about it, they’re probably be three great posts about, you know? I mean, it’s that it’s that thing of like, you just get out of practice and it’s harder to get back on it be like a it be like a basketball player who, like, took a year off and then wanted to get back on the court. You know, it’s like it’s like that. (TimeĀ 1:36:43)
  • Note: Quality versus quantity and how quantity produces quality