AUSTIN KLEON

Austin Kleon:
A writer who draws

With his daily life currently in flux while on a two month tour for his latest book, Keep Going, writer and artist Austin Kleon has been thinking about how to create a portable version of his routine.

“I think routine is so important, especially when you're getting started creatively, but for me right now, I almost need checkboxes and rituals more than I need routine.”

Currently, the daily checkboxes include writing in his diary, publishing a blog post, taking a walk, and reading a book.

Such a sequence has been influenced by the ‘the two Davids’ – Henry David Thoreau and David Sedaris, who essentially share the same approach to the writing process. That is, spending a large majority of their day walking. "Thoreau took these insanely long four to eight hour walks and then he would come back and write about them. Sedaris will wake up in the morning and will write in his diary for a couple of hours about the day before. Then he walks and picks up trash on the street for seven or eight hours a day.”

This repeatable process of collecting ideas, recording them in a diary, and then turning findings into public lectures and books is something Austin has duplicated in his own way. "I always keep a pocket notebook on me, and then I diary in the morning, and then create a blog post, and those blog posts will become talks, which then become books. You don't have to worry about what to write about, you just write every day and things begin to develop.”

Whether in the form of checkboxes or a routine, this process makes the morning hours crucial to his creativity. "The most important thing for me to do is to write my diary and to write a blog post. If I have done that, then the day in some ways is a success.”

While the process seems very achievable on paper, Austin is the first to admit that he doesn’t have it all figured out. “I think all routines are about aspiring rather than always executing.”

Instead of aspiring to perfection, we can learn to accept and nurture our imperfect tendencies. We don’t need to sand off our edges, as Austin puts it. “We're so obsessed with life hacking and with becoming these productive, shining examples of ourselves, but so much of good creative work comes from being a person that has tensions in their life.”

For Austin, embracing this tension means embracing his ‘deeply lazy’ side as well as his ‘driven workaholic’ side. “For a long time, I thought I had to pick one side, but I’ve realised it’s sometimes bouncing between these two modes that really gives my life meaning – I don't feel the work would be meaningful if I didn't have those deeply lazy moments, too.”

We all experience different tensions at different times, making it all the more important to find our own way. “You have to come up with your thing. Hopefully you would find little bits and pieces from people's routines if you think it can help you with a problem, but if there's not a problem, then don't worry about it.”

As Austin Kleon remind us, it’s about asking how we can be productive in our creative lives but also retain these imperfect parts of us that make us interesting – and keep going.

Morning

I get up at seven o'clock with my kids and we go downstairs and I fix them some breakfast. I try to stay off my phone for that first hour. We might sit in the kitchen and I’ll just drink hot water with lemon, kind of wake up and bring the kids anything they need. Some mornings we might all sit and read, some mornings I put on Netflix for them.

Then at about eight o'clock, my wife will come downstairs and I'll make her coffee and toast and we'll have a little bit of breakfast together.

At about eight thirty, I'll go up to the studio where I have a digital desk and an analogue desk. I’ll start at the analogue desk and get out my pocket notebook that I have with me all the time to scribble notes in throughout the day.

I'll use my pocket notebook to reconstruct yesterday in my logbook – I'll write down very simple things like, got up, wrote, did this errand, read this book, had this for dinner. It's just a very boring recounting of the previous day in list form.

After that, I start writing in my diary for anywhere between 20 to 45 minutes. I’ll write three to five pages about anything interesting that happened or that I want to unpack. I might even copy a passage from a book I'm reading or flesh out something from my pocket book – the goal of the diary is to warm up and to figure out what I'm thinking about.

If I really don't have anything to write about, I'll cut up newspaper comics, New York Times articles and a bunch of magazines I have laying around and I'll make what I call ‘sad teenager collages’.

Then I'll switch over to the digital desk and turn whatever seemed kind of interesting to me in the diary into a blog post.

Sometimes I'll spend an hour or two writing a blog post, and sometimes I'll spend ten minutes, it just depends. Sometimes I work a day in advance, so I'll write a post and schedule it for the next day.

Once I'm done with that, I will usually check Twitter, check Instagram, and go on my email to see if there's any pressing thing I need to get done. If I'm working on a book, I'll work on that. But if I have free time, I'll make one of my newspaper blackout poems.

My six-year-old, Owen, doesn't do a full day at school yet so sometimes I will bring him up to the studio with me. I like having him in the studio because he's a really creative guy and he really likes to tinker on his projects. He also inspires me because he'll start making a collage and I'll be like, "Oh that looks really fun, I want to make a collage too." Like a lot of six-year-old’s, he just has this raw creative drive that is completely unfiltered and I get kind of a buzz from being around him.

I'll work until lunchtime, which is usually around 11.30am, so I'll be in the studio for three hours.

Midday

We’ll eat lunch and then I put Owen on the school bus and my wife and I will take a walk.

We'll go for a three mile walk every afternoon and we'll push our four-year-old in the stroller for about an hour. Then we come back and shower up and I'll work for the rest of the afternoon, usually.

Afternoon

I adhere to John Waters' routine which is to make stuff in the morning, sell it in the afternoon.

If I have an interview to do, I'll do that. If I have email to work on, great. If I have a book to work on, I'll keep working on the book.

Thursday afternoons

Every Thursday afternoon I take a look at all my stuff to find ten links for the newsletter. I’ll have my logbook and diary in front of me, and Twitter, Instagram and blog open and pick out the best stuff from the week. I usually don't have to generate anything new, it's literally just sifting through the debris of the week.

In some ways the newsletter started out as a marketing device, but over time it has become one of my favourite things that I do and I think that’s because it’s like a diary in and of itself.

It's a very meaningful ritual to me because I get to look back at the week and think, "Did I write enough good stuff this week? Was I on track?"

One of my favourite writers Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who passed away not too long ago once tweeted,  "To anyone trying to figure out their life, pay attention to what you pay attention to. That's pretty much all the information you need." The newsletter's a way of paying attention to what I'm paying attention to.

If I don't have anything to do, I will read or I'll just potter around. I'll make another collage or I'll scribble a little bit. I'll do that until dinnertime.