Tell Good Stories

I recently read Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.  This is a short book of tips and advice for how to share your work while it's in production, get and keep people interested, and make a brand for yourself.  It's tips for showing people behind the scenes peeks, and for interacting with fans of your work and work you enjoy.

I was excited about this one because Kleon's previous book, Steal Like an Artist, was sincerely motivating.  It validated things I was already thinking about by putting the concepts into words much more elegantly than I ever could.  I'm also a big advocate for on-line social media, supporting dialogs about creativity, and the modernist view of "the hand of the artist."

Steal Like an Artist resonated with me more.  But, as Kleon says, your millage may vary and you need to take what you can from a work and leave the rest.

The early tips include sharing something small every day.  This is something with which I've been struggling lately.  I don't want to show an early draft of something I hope to later publish.  I also think that creating something solely for daily sharing purposes will take too much time away from my major projects, and showing warm-up pieces with consistently low quality isn't something people want to see real often.  So I was getting anxious about this book, and this advice is probably why I didn't finish it in a single sitting.

But the turning point came with two bits of advice that I found enlightening and profound, and which got me excited about sharing.

1. Share your tastes and influences.  It doesn't have to be work that you show every day, but it can also be things that you're thinking about or things that are affecting your work.  It can be what I'm reading, and what I thought about it, and what I learned, and how that will influence my work.  It can be fangirl screaming over whatever I think is cool.  Whew.  Because I consume a lot of media, and I've been trying to convince my mother for years that I'm analyzing and critiquing and learning from all the television that I watch.  And I can talk about this stuff all day.

2. Tell good stories.  Kleon presents the idea that each time you share, it should be a story.  There should be something there that can influence others, something that people can take and remix and incorporate into their own work.  There should be something there for them to care about.  Basically, each share should be a story.  With arcs, or rising and falling action, or character development.  Short stories, but stories nonetheless.  And he addressed that real life is different from fiction, which I appreciated.  That is to say, if you start a blog documenting your life, you might not end up with a complete, satisfying story.  Characters fall out of your life without tying up loose ends.  Things don't always get resolved.  Life isn't a one act play.  But snip-its of your life are. So the stories you tell about your life have to be short and sharable.

Has anyone else read this?  What did you think?  Anyone have to restrain themselves from posting photos of late art on twitter, because that's not a story?