Show Your Work
“I saw the Sex Pistols,” said New Order frontman Bernard Sumner. “They were terrible. . . . I wanted to get up and be terrible with them.”
I take an incredible amount of inspiration from all that Austin Kleon does, in particular the way that he collects amazing tidbits and quotes and organizes them into whole new things. That's kind of what his first book, Steal Like an Artist, was all about, so Show Your Work is like a real-life case study of artistic stealing, with the theme of open and honest sharing of whatever your creative pursuit might be. A good, quick read well worth the time.
Show Your Work by Austin Kleon
The following are excerpts taken from Austin Kleon's Show Your Work. Bold and italics are mine. Everything else is Austin's.
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“The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,”
writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus.
“On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.”
--Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.”--When the artist Ze Frank was interviewing job candidates, he complained, “When I ask them to show me work, they show me things from school, or from another job, but I’m more interested in what they did last weekend.”--
In the first act, you get your hero up a tree. The second act, you throw rocks at him. For the third act, you let him down.
— George Abbott--Emma Coats, a former storyboard artist at Pixar, outlined the basic structure of a fairy tale as a kind of Mad Lib that you can fill in with your own elements:Once upon a time, there was _____. Every day, _____. One day, _____. Because of that, _____. Because of that, _____. Until finally, _____.Pick your favorite story and try to fill in the blanks. It’s striking how often it works.--“If you want a happy ending,” actor Orson Welles wrote, “that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”--You can buy the book here.