You Need to Steal More
Why writer Austin Kleon and pretty much all the artists you like encourage outright theft.
What do David Bowie, Pablo Piccasso, TS Eliot, and Francis Ford Coppola have in common?
They’ve all confessed to stealing their art.
Even more despicable, they encourage others in this thievery.
Take this poem from Eliot (little-know fact: TS stands for Thieving Scoundrel):
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.
We have a word for this in journalism. Plagiarism. The P-word can haunt you for the rest of your life. Just ask Jayson Blair, formerly a reporter for The New York Times, who was found to have plagiarized 36 of his 76 articles. Jayson is now, I kid you not, a life coach in Virginia.
The P-word can spook creatives so badly that often we don’t even start a project for fear that it’s just like something else.
How many times have you gotten excited about an idea, only to realize that it’s just like another book, song, movie, Netflix show? If you’re like me, your next move is to abandon your initial excitement to the scrap heap of “good ideas I wish I had first.”
But David Bowie once said:
The only art I ever study is the stuff I can steal from.
And he wrote some pretty damn good songs.
So what the hell is going on here?
“Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying,” writes Write About Now Podcast guest Austin Kleon in his wildly popular book, Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.
Kleon may be onto something. He even stole his first name from the city he lives in. But he draws a distinction between copying and plagiarism. “Plagiarism is trying to pass someone’s work off as your own. Copying is about reverse-engineering,” he says.
So while Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era music sounds a lot like The Velvet Underground and The Byrds’ space ballads, he made it his own weird brilliant thing.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the idea for Kleon’s book began by stealing. “It was a series of blog posts where I just literally collected quotes from artists, talking about how they steal stuff.” He gave a talk on this topic to some community college students, the talk became a blog post, the post went viral, and a book was born.
Kleon is very much a writer for 2022. He’s hard to pin down with one description. He has a terrific substack newsletter (not as good as mine, but it’s good), he’s an illustrator, Ted Talker, and he does something called Newspaper Blackouts, which is a collection of poems made by redacting newspaper headlines with a permanent marker. The Atlantic called him “positively one of the most interesting people on the Internet.”
I have to agree. In our interview, he shared some valuable pieces of wisdom not just for writers but for being human, including:
The value of stealing all the art you love and mashing it up into a creation that is your own.
Why he gives a lot of advice away for free, and how he learned this technique from a successful BBQ restaurant in Austin.
Why it’s better to “write what you like,” not what you know.
Why he has three desks at his house: An analog desk, a digital desk, and what he calls a ‘Bliss Station.’
To listen to the episode go here.
And do me a favor, please. If you like the show, please rate it and leave a review. If that’s too much of a pain, cut and paste somebody else’s review and tweak it enough to make it your own.
David Bowie would approve.