"Show Your Work" by Austin Kleon

Show Your Work by Austin Kleon was a good book that followed up on and provided much more detail than Kleon's prior excellent book, Steal Like An Artist (which I reviewed two years ago).

The subtitle of Show Your Work is "10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered" and some of what Kleon writes is noted below...

1. You don't have to be a genius. Be part of a group contributing something and remember to be an amateur; amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing. Think about what you want to learn and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. You can't find your voice if you do to use it; talk about the things you love and your voice will follow. Read obituaries and keep in mind that they're not about death, they're about life, and second acts.

 2. Think process, not product. Take people behind the scenes of your creative work and show the idea and then all the steps to the idea. Kleon quotes journalist David Carr as saying "you have to make stuff, nobody is going to give a damn about your resume; they want to see what you made with your own little fingers."

3. Share something small every day. Don't worry too much about the big picture, just focus on what you do in a given day, do that and then give a daily update, whether that update be a blog post, tweet, LinkedIn update or whatever gets your message out. Also keep in mind that most of your work isn't great, but you have to get it out there to let people decide.

4. Open up your cabinet of possibilities. Don't be a hoarder, share your tastes, you may not have great output yet, but you do have tastes.

5. Tell good stories. Work doesn't speak for itself, people really do want to hear the story behind work. Structure is everything, a good pitch is three acts, where you've been, where you are now, where you want to go and this same principle can be applied to storytelling about others. Talk about yourself at parties, figure out how to describe who you are and what you do and don't describe yourself as aspiring if you really are doing something, it's ok to wear it.

6. Teach what you know. Share your trade secrets.

7. Don't turn into human spam. You want hearts, not eyeballs and practice the vampire test and be done hanging with people that suck the life out of you. At the same time, find the people similar to yourself... "identify your fellow knuckleballers."

8. Learn to take a punch. Let people take their best shot at you and don't feed the trolls.

9. Sell out. Kleon on the topic of selling out quotes from a great interview with Dave Eggers I linked to and wrote about a few years ago.

10. Stick around. The phrase "don't quit your show" is used along with "you can't plan on anything; you can only go about your work. You can't count on success; you can only leave open the possibility for it, and be ready to jump on and take the ride when it comes for you."

It was really solid stuff in the book and at the end Kleon both notes the blog on his website and book twitter hashtag #showyourwork.

Writers on Writing - from Nieman Storyboard & The Oatmeal

There's a couple of pieces I've come across lately on the subject of writing that stood out as particularly great... one a series of talks by writers on writing and one a comic about the writing process.

From the Nieman Storyboard website was a four part series taken from "The Power of Storytelling" annual writing conference in Romania and it featured some compelling thoughts from excellent writers. Introduction was “The Power of Storytelling,” Part 1: A bunch of American storytellers go to Romania… and it noted the writers who spoke and provided a brief excerpt from each person's address.

The speeches were all interesting, but four of them in particular stood out to me. From “The Power of Storytelling,” Part 2: Jacqui Banaszynski on the future of stories and Evan Ratliff on digital entrepreneurship Banaszynski provided a beautiful description of an obituary for her mother and Ratliff (founder and editor of Atavist) talked about just going with an idea and seeing where it takes you. Additionally of note was “The Power of Storytelling,” Part 4: Chris Jones on why stories matter, Pat Walters on endings, Walt Harrington on integrity and in it Jones wrote of not being a cynic (referencing a great bit from Dave Eggers) and Harrington provided an excellent take on truth and facts required in non-fiction writing.

In of course a very different genre, but equally great on the subject of producing writing was a comic strip I came across from The Oatmeal. "Some thoughts and musings about making things for the web" is just... great. It's funny, profound, realistic stuff from site creator Matthew Inman who also wrote the paperback book How to How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You.

Writing of Niceness - by & about Marilyn Hagerty

There was an interesting piece published earlier this month in a North Dakota newspaper earlier this month that had an absolutely fascinating reaction to it... with that reaction yielding some other interesting writing.

The piece itself was "Long-awaited Olive Garden Receives Warm Welcome" and the restaurant review from 85 year-old Grand Forks Herald columnist Marilyn Hagerty went viral on the Internet due to its earnest and seemingly small town take on the new Olive Garden. The review was humorous for this reason, but what really struck me was this concept of earnest and what a few other writers had to say about it in relation to Hagerty.

Two pieces that came from writers I follow were "In Web world, can we be sincere and cool, too?" by Tommy Tomlinson for the Charlotte Observer and "The Olive Garden" on the personal log of Joe Posnanski. The pieces were each written out of an Olive Garden meal the two friends shared and both expressed well an admiration for writing by Hagerty that was plain-spoken, but more to the point... devoid of sarcasm, biting irony or other vehicles of excessive critique. Posnanski's blog post was the longer of the two pieces and included a great vignette about him spending time with his daughters at Disney World and how it is that age tends to bring out the cynical in people. Really cool content that reminded me of a different Joe Posnanski blog post "Katie The Prefect" on an experience his daughter had at Harry Potter World and how great it is to still be young and excited by things.

A third recent and related piece was from her son, James Hagerty, a Wall Street Journal writer. "When Mom Goes Viral" provided more detail around someone writing what they felt and having that authenticity be the driver of their work. While on the path of "writing this story brought to mind", I also thought of an excellent interview with Dave Eggers where the author wrote about the import of doing things of interest without getting caught up in worrying about how outsiders will react to or judge your efforts.

Scott Raab on Writing / Dave Eggers on Creating (& not Dismissing)

Came across a few weeks ago a short and terribly insightful piece by Scott Raab (Esquire guy) on his website. The succinctly titled Writing has his advice for aspiring pen to page types and (to over simplify) boils down to if someone wants to be a writer, they write... and then they keep doing it.

Raab's advice reminded me of stuff I've linked to from James Altucher (who extols the virtues of writing fast and self-publishing) and Brandon Sneed (who did a few few posts on the writing process including an encouragement to write a book) and while not just on writing, seems in line with a Dave Eggers piece I recently found. Taken from a 2000 interview with The Harvard Advocate, his words on the dual subjects of creating / not dismissing create a mental visual of Eggers standing at a pulpit and railing away with his truth. What makes it all the much better is how much truth there seems to be in what Eggers so forcefully proclaims.

Very cool stuff that connects with messrs Raab, Sneed and Altucher is that each writes about the process of writing (heck, the process of anything if you want to expand the circle a bit) getting accomplished by just doing it and Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.