and Swell His Mind With Just and Great Ideas of Her Wondrous Art
In commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Steal Similar an Creative person, we're releasing a express gift edition on March 15th:
- first time in hardcover
- bigger trim size
- fancy ribbon bookmark & endpapers
- new afterword
If you'd like a signed and personalized copy, purchase from Bookpeople.
Otherwise, caput to your local bookstore or buy information technology online.
Click hither to subscribe.
"Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them."
—Psalm 126:6
"I climb upward on the house / weep to h2o the trees"
—Guided Past Voices
Another tearful week in our aging empire. At our firm, we're taking pleasure in our garden beds. Elsewhere, bad seeds are bringing along rotten fruit, merely hither, expert fruit is coming in. We've eaten a few strawberries plucked right off the plant. The tomatoes are getting bigger.
The more I learn near gardening, the richer the metaphor for creative work. This week I'grand learning more well-nigh composting. On a recent bike ride, Hank gave me a mini chemistry lesson in exothermic and endothermic reactions, anaerobic vs. aerobic decomposition, chemical bonds, carbohydrates, etc. I even got to stick my hand in to feel the heat of the heap.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes how she has "fullblown chlorophyll envy," and wishes she could "photosynthesize" and so that she could "exist doing the piece of work of the world while standing silent in the sun." It's hard non to envy the plants, who seem to know how to grow without anybody'southward help. They know what to practise without asking.
Here is a map in my diary of Lawrence Weschler'due south "Taxonomy of Convergences" that the writer has been working out in the past five bug of his Substack.
His idea of "convergences" — when something resembles something else, or makes you go, "that reminds me of…" and yous brand "free associative linkages" — has been a big influence on me. (Come across my web log tag: "Convergences.")
Here is an example of a convergence fromEverything That Rises: A Book of Convergences:
In this contempo taxonomy, Weschler proposes a spectrum of things that resemble 1 some other, ranging from an imagined but not existent connexion ("apophenia") to a connection that is being deliberately curtained (plagiarism).
The only problem is that these marvelous pieces have been sort of cached in his numbered Substack bug, then I'm hoping by sharing these images from my diary and direct links to the pieces, maybe it'll make you want to click through. It's a lot to sift through, but it rewards the sifter.
First up is an introduction to the concept of "convergences."
2nd is Apophenia, Chance/Blow, and Affinity, or "inchoate projections, vague coincidences and misty affinities" in which there is no real underlying connection other than the one we make.
The tertiary installment is "Co-Causation," or "that part of the widening spectrum where if things happen to look alike, it's considering they're probable to be drawing on the same sorts of sources."
The 4th installment covers "Direct Influence" and "Invocation," or, "the kind of things that happen as 1 artist or thinker or group of such artists or thinkers impacts upon another—both forward and astern, and consciously and unconsciously."
The 5th installment covers Allusion, Quotation, Appropriation, Cryptomnesia, and Plagiarism. (My favorite of the batch.) Weschler ends at a point on the spectrum in which things resemble each other for a reason, but the reason is being hidden from the states.
I suspect that some of u.s.a. are wired to see these convergences more than others. Only I too think this way of seeing is very infectious. (I call it "the globe keeps showing me these pictures.")
Alan Jacobs on how he uses Instapaper:
Whenever I meet something online that I think I want to read, I put it in Instapaper — and so I effort to leave it for a while. Often when I visit Instapaper the chief affair I exercise is delete the pieces I only hadidea I needed to read. So for me it'southward not just a read-later service, information technology's a don't-read-afterward service. But that just works if I don't go in that location as well often. I attempt to catch up with my Instapaper queue one time a week at almost.
Stealing this move.
A while back I found myself in the middle of doing something and thinking, Why on Earth did I hold to do this?
There'south a question that helps you avoid accepting invitations you'll subsequently regret: "Would I do information technology tomorrow?"
Here's David Plotz to explain (who learned information technology from his married woman Hanna Rosin, and her friend, New Yorker staff writer Margaret Talbot):
That's information technology—those five words. Not: Would I do it on some theoretical solar day in the future? This is the crucial question: Would I upend whatever I am doing tomorrow so that I tin go there and do that?
Are they paying you enough to skip your daughter's soccer game tomorrow? Is the console interesting enough that you lot don't mind asking your colleague to cover for yous, tomorrow? Is the conference important enough to your career that you lot would accident off your college roommate's visit, which is tomorrow. When y'all get the invitation, pay no attention at all to its far-flung date: Motion it mentally to tomorrow.
Tomorrow makes decisions elementary…
A picayune farthermost, possibly, but it helps me just a teensy bit more than than Derek Sivers' Hell Yeah or No. (I posted this on Twitter and James Kochalka responded," If I lived past that creed i'd just never do anything, I recollect. And too exist happier.")
* * *
Related reading: the "Learn to say no" section in Keep Going.
The outside edge of a book's pages opposite of the spine is called the "fore-border." Like many things that are neglected or overlooked, it'southward a place of great creative potential. Cheque out this video with fore-edge painter Martin Frost:
I don't commonly exercise all that much with the fore-edges of my books, except for my notebooks, which I sometimes index past rubbing ink or pencil over the page edges of some sections and labelling them. (See the logbook to a higher place.)
Most recently information technology occurred to me that I could employ fore-edge indexing equally a style to rail the structure of a volume. I was reading a book and it was going splendidly and so all the sudden I got bogged downwardly. I suspected it had something to practice with pacing and chapter length. So I did a fore-edge index and soon I had visual evidence of my suspicion: swelling chapters broke up the catamenia. (I could probably detect similar evidence based on where I happened to dog-ear a folio.)
This might exist a good exercise for writers: make a fore-edge index of some of your favorite books, and see how they are structured and paced. For books that alternating narratives or subjects, y'all tin use dissimilar colors. (See to a higher place.)
Filed under: marginalia
To celebrate Independent Bookstore Day 2022 and the 10th anniversary of the Steal Like an Artist, my publisher Workman and I produced a free 12-page glossy zine chosen "Read Like an Creative person," with 10 tips for a amend life with books.
Here is a very brusk list of the bookstores who ordered a ton (250+) of copies:
- Books and Mortar, 1000 Rapids, MI
- Skylark Bookshop, Columbia, MO
- Highland Books, Brevard, NC
- Mojo Books & Records, Tampa, FL
- hi again books, Cocoa, FL
- Books Around the Corner, Gresham, OR
- Commonplace Reader, Yardley, PA
- Afterwords Books, Edwardsville, IL
- The Bookstore of Glen Ellyn, Glen Ellyn, IL
- Sweet Reads Books, Austin, MN
- Octavia Books, New Orleans, LA
- Aesops Fable, Holliston, MA
- Side by side Page Books & Nosh, Frisco, CO
- Reads & Company in Phoenixville, PA
- Round Table Bookstore in Topeka, KS
- The Magic of Books Bookstore, Seymour, IN
At that place are literally hundreds of bookstores participating, so check with your favorite local indie to see if they got copies!
If you live in Austin, Texas or nearby, on Saturday, April 30, I'll be at two of my favorite bookstores here in town, signing and drawing in my books and hand-selling my favorites.
10AM-12PM – I'll be at Bookpeople, our flagship store in town. Go there early — they should accept effectually 100 zines.
2PM-4PM – I'll exist at Blackness Pearl Books, my hyper-local neighborhood shop. They'll accept about 25 zines, so they might be out by the fourth dimension I show up.
Our friends at Bookwoman should have about 100 copies, likewise, so that might actually be your best bet for snagging one in the 512 area lawmaking. (If you're down south, I just constitute out that Reverie Books has a handful, too.)
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In a letter to a friend, Beatrix Potter wrote about her recent adventures in "proplifting,"
Mrs Satterthwaite says stolen plants always grow, I stole some 'honesty' yesterday, it was put to be burnt in a heap of pass up! I have had something out of nearly ever garden in the hamlet.
Elsewhere, she said she was relieved when people offered her plants. "I don't feel like such a robber of the hamlet gardens."
(h/t @brookemackey, Source: Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life)
My May choice for our Read Similar an Creative person volume club is ane of my all-fourth dimension favorites and a bonafide classic: Scott McCloud'south Agreement Comics. To bring together our word side by side month, sign upwardly now.
Hither's my intro:
This a comic book about comic books. But it's as well much more than that: using the medium of comics, Scott McCloud explains a whole world of visual advice and teaches lessons that apply to anyone working in any kind of visual medium. To quote Art Spiegelman, the "simple-looking tome deconstructs the secret language of comics while casually revealing secrets of time, space, art and the cosmos!" Originally published in the early 90s, this book has become a contemporary archetype, and is in my top x all-fourth dimension influential books on my own practice. Even if you're not at all interested in comics, I promise that y'all will learn something from McCloud. And who knows? Information technology might even open up a whole genre for you. I love this book because after y'all read it, you lot come across the whole world differently.
To join our word, sign up for the club.
"It is better to take what does not belong to yous than to permit it lie around neglected."
—Mark Twain (quoted in Steal Like an Creative person)
"Stolen plants ever grow."
—Beatrix Potter
My married woman routinely picks up clippings and fallen constitute parts off the route when we go on our daily walks and brings them home and propagates new plants from them, and then I was delighted to find that there's a term called "proplifting":
This tweet recently went viral and caused an online row about whether information technology's right or wrong. (Or legal, which is oftentimes different from correct or wrong!) I beloved this Reddit folio, which is titled "1 man's trash is another man'southward propagation."
My friend Matt sent me this photo of a plant he grew from a single foliage he picked upwards at a big box store which will go unnamed. (On yesterday's bike ride, I told my neighbour Hank, a gardener, about proplifting, and ironically, at the terminate of our walk we constitute a whole fern in the gutter to take home.)
I frequently wonder how different Steal Similar an Artist would be if I had been interested in gardening then as much as I am now. It provides such rich metaphors for artistic work. (Gardening was a big influence onKeep Going, hence the final chapter, "Found your garden.")
Filed under: gardening
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