Tag: Austin Kleon

In Order to Keep Going, You Must Start

By Brendan O’Meara

More than an anything else these days, we need to heed the advice from Austin Kleon who said:

Maybe the world will always be crazy, and creative work will always be hard. Then the question becomes: How do you keep going?

As hard as it is to keep going, sometimes it’s equally hard to start. It’s daunting. How can you write all those words? It’s overwhelming, so you don’t even start. 

And so it was great when Kleon shared a quote from the author Stephen Harrigan that makes starting that much easier. Harrigan says:

I think that when it comes to writing books, you have to start before you think you’re ready, because you will always feel like you are never ready. I find that as you write the book, the road ahead becomes clearer; before that, the road ahead is just a distraction.

Isaac Newton’s laws of motion say that bodies in motion want to stay in motion and that items not in motion want to stay in put. Of course, I’m butchering that, but it’s all about inertia.

Artistic projects are the same. Once they’re in motion, they want to stay in motion and then, as Kleon said, you keep going.

MONTHLY NEWSLETTER!: Once a Month. No Spam. Can’t Beat It.

View previous campaigns.

The Age of Process or The Story Behind the Story as More Important Than the Story

Fatigued pencil. #keepwriting

A photo posted by Brendan O’Meara (@brendanomeara) on

By Brendan O’Meara

Listening to the run up to the Oscars, what was the main thing you heard about Richard Linklater’s Boyhood? It wasn’t how great a movie it was or how powerful the performances were. It was This movie took twelve years to make!

The marketing machine behind this movie was brilliant. I haven’t seen Boyhood yet (I will), but the true brilliance of this movie is the story behind the story. The actors and filmmakers committed a few months every year for twelve years to make the film.

This story behind the story was more powerful than the story itself.

So what’s the lesson? As I see it, make your process as transparent as possible and make the making of your art part of the narrative. Blogs are perfect for this. Show Your Work, as Austin Kleon would say.

Part of Boyhood’s appeal was this notion of backstory. Whether it was intentional or not from the outset is unknown, but once it became part of the movie’s machinery, it was this unbelievable talking point that made the movie irresistible to viewers because people kept saying, “Can you believe this movie took twelve years to make?”

This backstory was even more powerful than the actual movie. A Google search for “boyhood took 12 years to make” yields over 4 million hits.

Blog about your book. Take pictures. Make little confession movies. Make a mini documentary about your project. Pretend someone is interviewing you and answer questions. Create a story about the story and people will read the story you want to sell.

 

Great Quote from a Great Comedian (Mike Myers)

Written by Brendan O’Meara

I got this quote via Austin Kleon’s website. If you’re not receiving his weekly newsletter and following his work, do it.

I never thought that I’d be discovered. I just thought I’d be somebody who was a hard worker. For me, things started to happen once I completely gave up the concept of being discovered. I discovered what I wanted to do. That would be my advice to young performers: don’t want to be famous. Want to be legendary. In many ways, fame is the industrial disease of creativity. It’s a sludgy byproduct of making things. —Mike Myers

This is a great quote. There’s no substitute for doing good work and trusting that the good work will take you where you want to go. It comes down to process. When you’re wed to the process and love the process, the work will take care of itself. People get lost when they’re outcome driven.

Process-driven people are the ones who make it.

The Best Approach to Art and the Importance of Endings

Written by Brendan O’Meara

A funny thing happened. In an effort to connect better with readers I had started writing every day on this blog (I’ve since moved that every-day writing to my journal, something I’ll get to in another post.).

I figured since I’ve got a smattering of email subscribers, the total of which could field two football teams, writing every day may be welcome. False. I wrote every day, was feeling good, only to find that instead of gaining more readers, five left. I guess they got their free signed book and peaced out. Such is life. I’m thankful to have had them for a brief time.

I did find it mildly irritating that the more I fed the blog, the less weight it gained. It’s like I fed it celery. These things happen. But you’re still here … for now … and so I’ll give you some cool stuff I’ve stumbled upon.

I got this great quote from Austin Kleon’s blog. You need to be reading his work and especially his books Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work. Just makes you want to make stuff! Here’s the quote:

Don’t make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people — and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts. —John Green

Make gifts for people (readers). They’ll reward you in kind. Perhaps. Ha!

The Importance of Endings

I’ve been into screenplays recently. I’ve read The Dark Knight Trilogy screenplays but also The Grand Budapest Hotel. In The Dark Knight Trilogy book, there’s a wonderful interview at the beginning with the writers and director of the movies. Christopher Nolan, director and writer on all the movies, said:

For me, endings are everything. I did have the same thing on The Dark Knight. Once I figured out the feeling I wanted to get at the end of that film, then I knew I had a project that I wanted to get into. For me, that’s everything in this kind of story, to know where you want it to go. (emphasis mine) And then it took years and years for all of us to figure out how to get there.

I’ve written about the ending to The Dark Knight on this blog before and how I think it’s one of the strongest movie endings in all of cinema. Nolan nails his endings every time. The ending to Inception still has people wondering what was real and what wasn’t. The Prestige is brilliant on every level, especially its coda. The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises leave you with goosebumps every time. Well, me, I suppose.

Do Cool Stuff: The Key to Being a Writer

Written by Brendan O’Meara

My big writer’s resolution of 2014 was to do more immersion projects. I stopped covering high school games. I’ve covered hundreds upon hundreds of games. They’re not worth my time any more in a very small media market.

The best thing any writer can do is to do interesting things (or do things the writer finds interesting). The technical skills that come with writing comes with repetition.

The literary agent Jeff Kleinman visited Goucher College one summer residency. This was in 2007. He rattled a lot of cages for harping on the MFA program for producing what he loathes: the MFA Voice. The MFA Voice is subjective, of course, but it’s a voice that is technically sounds but almost always devoid of energy, spunk, and edge. It’s a voice that is bogged down by fundamentals, that’s too aware of itself, that doesn’t want to get in the way of the story. It can be very vanilla. Take movies. You know when you’re watching a Wed Anderson, a Christopher Nolan, a Stephen Spielberg, a Quentin Tarantino. That’s voice.  We want to occupy their brain space for two to three hours at a time.

Certain stories that are very heavy need the author to step back, but for most stories, especially memoir, the voice has to be engaging and full of energy. The key, as Austin Kleon writes in his great book Show Your Work, is to “Be an Amateur.”

Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid.

That’s what Jonathan Safran Foer did when he wrote Everything is Illuminated. He wrote like an amateur. In Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, Gladwell wrote a great piece on late bloomers (Foer is not a late bloomer, but the other side of the coin). Foer brought an amateur approach to his writing. He was a freshman at Princeton (smaht kid, as we say in the Boston area). On a whim, he took a creative writing class with Joyce Carol Oates. Gladwell wrote:

Oates told him that he had the most important of writerly qualities, which was energy. He had been writing fifteen pages a week for that class, an entire story for each seminar.

“Why does a dam with a crack in it leak so much?” [Foer] said with a laugh. “There was just something in me, there was like a pressure.”

Foer went to Ukraine to see where his grandfather came from (doing cool stuff). He came back. Foer said:

I was just writing. I didn’t know that I was writing until it was happening. I didn’t go with the intention of writing a book. I wrote three hundred pages in ten weeks. I really wrote. I’d never done it like that.

This is the type of thing that gets a bit smothered in the MFA crowd, a crowd that gets bitter when their technically sound prose can’t find a home. It’s like what Kleinman told me once, “It doesn’t matter how great a writer you are if you’re not writing anything people want to read.”

I’m writing about maple syrup these days. It’s cool. It’s about syrup, but it’s also about my fleeting sense of manhood and a search for brotherhood. Anyway, go ahead and watch some sap dump into the holding tank. I think it’s interesting.

Today is the First Day of the Rest of the Blog!

Written by Brendan O’Meara (email sign up form ====>)

I read the great Show Your Work by Austin Kleon on my Kindle on Wednesday. It’s a short book, but I highlighted a huge number of passages (I’ll share more as I go, but I’ll practically copy and paste the whole book here if I copy them all now). The premise of the book is that by sharing your work, giving away insights, and process for free, it actually helps build your army. It’s simply a look behind the curtain.

It makes a lot of sense. People have been doing this for years now. By being consistent and giving away personality and access into the work, it’s a positive feedback loop that feeds the artist as well as the consumer. Kleon writes:

Instead of wasting their time “networking,” they’re taking advantage of the network. By generously sharing their ideas and their knowledge, they often gain an audience that they can then leverage when they need it—for fellowship, feedback, or patronage.

I’ve tried just about everything to build a following (and failed). The one thing I haven’t done is share a little every day. That’s my goal for a month, to share a little every day. I’ll scale back after that (maybe). I’ll use it as a warmup for my day’s work. I’ll share some of the mechanics behind what I’m working on. But, like Kleon writes:

Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal: Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook. Take a lot of photographs of your work at different stages in your process. Shoot video of you working. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones.

That’s the dilly. I’m working on a ton of junk, but I hope that junk turns into something great, something worth buying, something worth re-reading. So, like the Chips Ahoy! cookie, “Today! Is the first day of the rest of my ….”