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

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

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…...