A few weeks ago I gave a talk on Newspaper Blackout and Steal Like An Artist at The Economist’s Human Potential summit in New York City. They had an awesome tech staff, so we even managed to weave some of my live drawings from the conference into the talk. Enjoy!
Steal Like An Artist
This post is now a New York Times best-selling book.
Here’s what a few folks have said about it:
- “Brilliant and real and true.”
—Rosanne Cash - “Filled with well-formed advice that applies to nearly any kind of work.”
—Lifehacker.com - “Immersing yourself in Steal Like An Artist is as fine an investment in the life of your mind as you can hope to make.”
—The Atlantic
Buy it:
A POEM IS DISCOVERED IN PLAY
Don’t wait until you know who you are and what you’re about to start making things.
Last December, there was a video of Rainn Wilson (the actor who plays Dwight on the office) going around of him talking about “creative block” and how to get over it. His advice:
If you don’t know who you are or what you’re about or what you believe in it’s really pretty impossible to be creative.
If I waited to know “who I was” or “what I was about” before I started “being creative”, well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things.
In my experience, it’s in the act of making things that we figure out who we are. And often, the best work comes when we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing.
So yeah, if you’re having trouble, go take a walk, or find some new materials, but don’t linger over what it all means. Start playing.
GOLDILOCKS
Sometimes I get asked why I make art. I think I’ll start quoting this poem: “I’m trying to get Goldilocks to go home.” I’m not sure what it means, but it feels right.
Did you know in the original Story Of The Three Bears it wasn’t a little girl, but a nasty old woman who enters the Bear residence?
An old hairy woman (who is described at various points in the story as impudent, bad, foul-mouthed, ugly, dirty and a vagrant deserving of a stint in the House of Correction) discovers the bears’ dwelling. After assuring herself no one is about, she enters the house. The old woman eats the Wee Bear’s porridge, then settles into his chair and breaks it. Prowling about, she finds the bear’s beds and falls asleep in Wee Bear’s bed. The climax of the tale is reached when the bears return. Wee Bear finds the old woman in his bed and cries, “Somebody has been lying in my bed,—and here she is!” The old woman starts up, jumps from the window, and is never seen again.
Yeah, that’s what it’s like to create sometimes. There’s a foul-mouthed, dirty old woman up in my brain, and she has to eat all my soup, break my chair, and dirty my bed until I can catch her and throw her out the window.
PUNT
Last night I tried for hours and hours to get a good poem. It just didn’t happen. This scrap is the best I could come up with.
I went on Twitter to complain:
And I had forgotten. It’d been weeks since I tried to make one. (I got occupied with reading and getting the store up and running.) There were days during the six months I was making the book, when I made 2 or 3 or even 4 a day…good ones, too. I was in the groove. I was making a lot of work.
Inertia is the death of creativity. You have to keep moving, keep making. So much of making art is muscle memory, keeping your routine…
And when you get out of the groove, you start to dread making work, because you know it’s going to suck for a while–it’s going to suck until you get back into the flow. A tweet from last week:
I should never let myself get to this point. I need the advice as much as anybody:
Take half an hour every day and make something. No matter what. No holidays, no sick days. Don’t stop.
(And don’t punt.)
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