I’ll preface this by telling you that I like Austin Kleon. I’ve read his books and each one breathed life into my creative process. I also subscribe to his newsletter (and you should too). He is really really good at sharing the things that inspire him. He talks about it in Show Your Work, and he lives it on the regular in his newsletter. If you stop reading now and just go sign up for his newsletter, I’d be delighted.
Austin Kleon carved out a place in the world with his popular newspaper blackout poems that were everywhere in the mid 2000’s. Yep, he started that—people still copycat them today. He’s kind of a big deal in his own right, but the magic that is Austin Kleon is his work of sharing the glorious things his brain devours.
Keep Going is no different. It’s filled with smart, inspiring quotes cherry-picked by Kleon and surrounded by his own equally insightful thoughts about all things creative. As usual, the layout of this book is engaging and it’s a fast read. There were moments where the book felt a bit darker than the others, but we’re living in darker times, so it follows. Still, there is hope in this book! It’s real hope, not self-help book hope that dissipates after reading.
Hope. One of the things that caught me off guard in this book was the following quote:
You start each work not knowing exactly where you’re going or where you’ll end up. “Art is the highest form of hope,” said painter Gerhard Richter. But hope is not about knowing how things will turn out—it is moving forward in the face of uncertainty. It’s a way of dealing with uncertainty. “Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unkowable,” writes Rebecca Solnit. To have hope, you must acknowledge that you don’t know everything and you don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the only way to keep going and the only way to keep making art: to be open to possibility and allow yourself to be changed.”
Kleon, Keep Going, 135.
I went through a creative drought that lasted years. This is hard to admit. It’s hard to accept that I let it happen. It was even harder to crawl out of, but I did, I am. It requires continual effort and the abyss has a gravitational pull—you have to keep moving to stay ahead of it. Create is a verb. You have to write to be a writer. You have to do the work, and keep doing the work. Shifting the focus from shame and guilt over lost creative time toward being grateful for climbing out of a life I didn’t design is a work in progress. It rang bells inside me when I read this. Hope, audacity, a willingness to fail, you need these things to create.
There was no hope during that drought. It wasn’t a bad life at all and so many good things happened during that time (I fell in love with my partner), but creatively, I was a barren field. There was anxiety and a suffocating feeling that my art was pointless. I lost my audacity, and it takes a certain amount of audacity to create. As Kleon mentions in Keep Going, it’s okay to change your mind. It’s okay to have passionate hobbies that you don’t try to make into a career. That’s healthy! That’s normal! It’s also okay to realize you need to rebuild your entire life and find a way to make your passions pay your bills. Basically, you do you.
The best advice in this book is something I’ve been slowly applying over the past two years, “Pay attention to what you pay attenion to.” Everything follows from this. Everything.
Your attention is one of the most valuable things you posess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction.
As they say in the movies, “Careful where you point that thing!”
What you choose to pay attention to is the stuff your life and your work will be made of.”
Kleon, Keep Going, 115.
Kleon’s books are like having a conversation with your favorite creative friend— those conversations you had every day in your early twenties that left you so inspired you were going to start a publishing company the next day and make all the things! The conversations that recharged you creatively. That’s what his books are for me. Thank you for making them, Austin Kleon.
