One page diary

Short videos of easy exercises for filling the page

Hey y’all,

One of the big questions of my book Show Your Work! is: How can you take bits and pieces of your process and serve them up to your audience in a way that’s interesting and/or useful? Your process is always evolving, as are methods of sharing it, so it can be a challenge to get them to line up just right. Worse yet, the social media platforms keep changing their algorithms, which usually amounts to a tiny fraction of the people who are following you actually seeing your posts.

This weekend I experimented with a bunch of Instagram Reels. I despise the idea of creating “content” (blech!) for the algorithm, but I’m interested in the algorithm as a kind of creative constraint.

(Note: I’m embedding video from TikTok because, well, Instagram are dopes about letting you embed stuff. To watch a video, click on the image.)

@austinkleonEasy one page diary exercise #kleondiaries

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How do you make short form video content that the algorithm rewards without too much effort or without changing your process too much?

Honestly, you probably don’t. When we know we’re being watched, it changes the way we operate.

For me, there’s a little compromise: shoot time-lapse video while I’m working and try to forget the camera is running. After the footage is shot, add some music, and annotate it with captions explaining what I’m doing. (I find it impossible to talk about making art while I’m making art. It was a revelation to me when I learned that Bob Ross always had a finished painting offscreen that he copied while he was filming.)

@austinkleonOne page diary exercise

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These are videos of an exercise I call “One Page Diary.” It’s a mix of Lynda Barry’s brush diaries (see: Syllabus and her other books) and Nicholson Baker’s idea of “cheerful retrospection”:

If you ask yourself, ‘What’s the best thing that happened today?’ it actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pulls up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn’t otherwise think about. If you ask yourself, ‘What happened today?’ it’s very likely that you’re going to remember the worst thing, because you’ve had to deal with it–you’ve had to rush somewhere or somebody said something mean to you–that’s what you’re going to remember. But if you ask what the best thing is, it’s going to be some particular slant of light, or some wonderful expression somebody had, or some particularly delicious salad….

I should note I do “morning pages” — I was never able to muster the energy to write at the end of the day.

@austinkleonHow I write my morning diary #kleondiaries

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My approach to my diary is just to fill the page. My method is dirt simple:

1. I use a brush pen because it slows me way down.

2. I write the date really, really slowly, concentrate on making the letters look good, freeing up my unconscious to throw some stuff up at me.

3. I write “The best thing yesterday was…” and then answer the prompt. I don’t overthink it, just write it down. Then go as long as I want.

4. If there’s space left or I can’t think of words, I draw a picture, layering up with my CMYK pens.

5. After I’ve filled that page, sometimes I stop, but sometimes I get a new idea and start a new page.

That’s about it. Shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes, really.

@austinkleonOne page diary exercise #kleondiaries

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There’s a variation of the One Page Diary that I call “Spiraling Out.” I’ve gone over this method before, but here’s a video of what it looks like:

@austinkleonOne page spiral diary #kleondiaries

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I do the spiral with one color pen and then I annotate it with another color. When I’m done, I stamp it with my old trusty date stamp.

@austinkleon“What kind of pen do you use?” #kleondiaries

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The funniest thing to me about posting these videos is that there’s always at least one comment asking me what pen I use! Still cracks me up after all this time.

Speaking of tools, here’s what I use to shoot these videos:

1. iPhone with the camera’s built-in Timelapse function.

2. A desktop boom stand clipped to the kitchen table

3. A Manfrotto Smartphone Clamp connected to the boom stand.

That’s it. (A kitchen table next to a sunny window with a nice white filtered blind helps.)

For more of my diary, here’s a full walkthrough of my winter diary from back in April.

Let me know in the comments if this was helpful or if you have any diary tips of your own. I’d also love to hear if there are any videos y’all would like me to make. (Other than my collage method! I’m still working out when and how and if I want to share that...) And if there’s an artist you think does Instagram Reels or TikTok videos particuarly well, let me know!

xoxo,

Austin