Austin Kleon - Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad

For Meghan + Owen + Jules

(The Reasons I Keep Going)

Contents

I think I need to keep being creative, not to prove anything but because it makes me happy just to do it... I think trying to be creative, keeping busy, has a lot to do with keeping you alive.

Willie Nelson

I Wrote this Book Because I Needed to Read It

A few years ago, Id wake up every morning, check the headlines on my phone, and feel as if the world had gotten dumber and meaner overnight. Meanwhile, Id been writing and making art for more than a decade, and it didnt seem to be getting any easier. Isnt it supposed to get easier?

Everything got better for me when I made peace with the fact that it might not ever get easier. The world is crazy. Creative work is hard. Life is short and art is long.

Whether youre burned out, starting out, starting over, or wildly successful, the question is always the same: How to keep going?

This book is a list of ten things that have helped me. I wrote it primarily for writers and artists, but I think the principles apply to anyone trying sustain a meaningful and productive creative life, including entrepreneurs, teachers, students, retirees, and activists. Many of the points are things Ive stolen from others. I hope youll find some things worth stealing, too.

There are no rules, of course. Life is an art, not a science. Your mileage may vary. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Keep going and take care of yourself.

Ill do the same.

None of us know what will happen. Dont spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. Thats it.

Laurie Anderson

Whenever someone starts talking about the creative journey, I roll my eyes.

It sounds too lofty to me. Too heroic.

The only creative journey I seem to go on is the ten-foot commute from the back door of my house to the studio in my garage. I sit down at my desk and stare at a blank piece of paper and I think, Didnt I just do this yesterday?

When Im working on my art, I dont feel like Odysseus. I feel more like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill. When Im working, I dont feel like Luke Skywalker. I feel more like Phil Connors in the movie Groundhog Day.

For those of you who havent seen it or need your memory refreshed, Groundhog Day is a 1993 comedy starring Bill Murray as Phil Connors, a weatherman who gets stuck in a time loop and wakes up every morning on February 2ndGroundhog Dayin Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, home of Punxsutawney Phil, the famous groundhog who, depending on if he sees his shadow or not, predicts whether there will be six more weeks of winter. Phil, the weatherman, hates Punxsutawney, and the town becomes a kind of purgatory for him. He tries everything he can think of, but he cant make it out of town, and he cant get to February 3rd. Winter, for Phil, is endless. No matter what he does, he still wakes up in the same bed every morning to face the same day.

In a moment of despair, Phil turns to a couple drunks at a bowling alley bar and asks them, What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?

Its the question Phil has to answer to advance the plot of the movie, but its also the question we have to answer to advance the plot of our lives.

I think how you answer this question is your art.

Now, Im not the first person to suggest that Groundhog Day is perhaps the great parable of our time. Harold Ramis, the movies director and cowriter, said he got endless letters from priests, rabbis, and monks, all praising the movies spiritual message and claiming it for their own religion. But I think the movie has particular relevance for people who want to do creative work.

The reason is this: The creative life is not linear. Its not a straight line from point A to point B. Its more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. No matter how successful you get, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really arrive. Other than death, there is no finish line or retirement for the creative person. Even after you have achieved greatness, writes musician Ian Svenonius, the infinitesimal cadre who even noticed will ask, What next?

The truly prolific artists I know always have that question answered, because they have figured out a daily practicea repeatable way of working that insulates them from success, failure, and the chaos of the outside world. They have all identified what they want to spend their time on, and they work at it every day, no matter what. Whether their latest thing is universally rejected, ignored, or acclaimed, they know theyll still get up tomorrow and do their work.

We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it. It might seem like a stretch, but I really think the best thing you can do if you want to make art is to pretend youre starring in your own remake of Groundhog Day: Yesterdays over, tomorrow may never come, theres just today and what you can do with it.

Any man can fight the battles of just one day, begins a passage collected in Richmond Walkers book of meditations for recovering alcoholics, Twenty-Four Hours a Day. It is only when you and I add the burden of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives men mad. It is remorse or bitterness for something which happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring. Let us therefore do our best to live but one day at a time.

The creative journey is not one in which youre crowned the triumphant hero and live happily ever after. The real creative journey is one in which you wake up every day, like Phil, with more work to do.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Annie Dillard

Relying on craft and routine is a lot less sexy than being an artistic genius. But it is an excellent strategy for not going insane.

Christoph Niemann

There will be good days and bad days. Days when you feel inspired and days when you want to walk off a bridge. (And some days when you cant tell the difference.)