Steal Like an Artist
10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
by Austin Kleon
Workman Publishing Company, 2012. 152 pages.
This is a little book of excellent suggestions for young adults who want to pursue creative work. I say young adults, because as an adult who’s more set in my ways, I’ve already developed my own versions of some of these suggestions, like “Get yourself a calendar,” “Keep a log book,” and “Keep your day job.” (And those are all under the Ninth Thing: “Be Boring. (It’s the only way to get work done.”)
I do love the title Thing: “Steal like an artist.” Here are some good lines from the section explaining it:
What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.
If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.
The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.
As much as I love collecting quotations and writing book reviews, it’s not a surprise I love this idea.
Of course, this was my favorite bit:
Always be reading. Go to the library. There’s magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It’s not the book you start with, it’s the book that book leads you to.
Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.
Partly why I say this is for young adults is Thing Two: “Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.” It’s still good advice at age 53, but I have more of an idea than I did in my twenties.
The format of the book is such that it’s a great book to pull out and read a bit each morning to start your day with some inspiration. I tend to get such books read much more quickly than books that need a significant stretch of time in order to absorb them.
There are lots more good ideas for being creative for people of any age and place in their journey. I will probably give this book to my young adult children, who each have a creative side. And I’m storing away some of the advice to appropriate into my own life.
Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/steal_like_an_artist.html
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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.
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What did you think of this book?