Keep Going: sustaining a creative practice

Austin Kleon’s books are tiny things.

Little square volumes, they’re heavy on illustrations and light on words. Even if you read them slowly, savouring every sentence, you’ll probably be done in 90 minutes. And yet… you’ll keep pulling them off the shelf, diving back into them, because they are kind and funny and very wise indeed about creative process.

Steal Like An Artist is about getting started on a project. It’s about finding inspiration from your heroes, from what interests or excites you, then turning those influences into something of your own.

Show Your Work is about putting your work out there, finding an audience, and getting paid for what you create. They’re both brilliant.

But the book I’m recommending here is about the harder business of showing up every day, and just doing the work (and the play).

Navigating the messy middle.

Keep Going deals with the longer, stickier stretch in between getting started and showing your work. The bit where many of us get lost. Sub-titled 10 Ways To Stay Creative In Good Times and Bad, it’s a guide to sustaining a creative practice – a book, Kleon declares in the opening, that he wrote because he needed to read it.

I’d initially planned to write about Steven Pressfield’s The War Of Art, which I’ve often mentioned to clients to help with fear, procrastination and all the other blocks we built to keep us from our creative work. A decade or so ago, it helped me end an epic bout of procrastination – more like a two-year paralysis, really – and I‘ll always be grateful for that.

But re-reading it, I was surprised at the hectoring, almost bullying tone. The endless macho war metaphors were tedious. And I can’t agree with Pressfield’s sweeping claims that all the cause of all the world’s ills from cancer to war is thwarted creativity.

The hero’s journey

It all just seemed so rigid and unbending. If you’re sick and stop work for a day or three, if you take time out to be with people you love, or if you simply take a break, that doesn’t make you an amateur, as Pressfield loudly contends. It makes you human.

So I went back to my journal, from when I first read The War Of Art. “It was just the kick up the arse I needed,” I wrote with satisfaction. And I realised I don’t tend to use that kind of language these days, in my thoughts or in my writing. It’s rarely helpful, for me. Or healthy.

To Pressfield, misery and suffering are just part of the hero’s journey, and if you want to be a writer, an artist, or any other kind of creative, you should just suck it up. He sees art as a daily war of attrition against the forces of Resistance, a battle every creative needs to fight anew, every day. Which is fine, as far as it goes. And if that works for you, go for it. But it’s not very joyful.

At some point, I chose to focus on writing – creating – because I want to, not because I push myself to do it and beat myself up when I don’t. And of course that’s hard sometimes. Of course there are days when I really don’t want to write.

But I’ve tried not writing. And I’ve tried writing. For me, the writing is better.

From Star Wars to Groundhog Day

Kleon takes a similar approach. He doesn’t see himself as some lone hero on a war-like quest to make his art. He simply leaves his house in Austin, Texas every morning, ambles out to his workspace (his ‘bliss station’) and gets on with it. Because it’s who he is, what he does.

“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,” he writes. “I sit down at my desk and stare at a blank piece of paper and I think, ‘Didn’t I just do this yesterday?’

“When I’m working on my art, I don’t feel like Odysseus. I feel more like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill. When I’m working, I don’t feel like Luke Skywalker. I feel more like Phil Connors in the movie Groundhog Day.”

Recasting work as play

His language is less martial, more playful. He emphasises gentle routines, lots of play, good music, good books. Plus exercise, sleep, kindness, going slow and recognising that our creativity has its cycles and seasons.

He advocates keeping your tools tidy and your studio messy. Marie Kondo’s austere approach to clutter does not spark joy for him. We don’t see new connections, he says, if everything is tidied away into neat pigeonholes.

He urges us to notice and celebrate everyday magic, and pay attention to the right things. (Less news and screens; more naps, walks and exchanging drawings of robots with his son.)

There’s a little gem of wisdom of almost every page of his unassuming little book, and I’m not going to share it all here because you should buy it. Or at least read his excellent blog and subscribe to his inspiration-packed weekly email.

But just as a taster, here are five little nuggets from Keep Going.

On routine:

“When you don’t have much time, a routine helps you make the little time you have count. When you have all the time in the world, a routine helps you make sure you don’t waste it. I’ve written while holding down a day job, written full-time from home, and written while caring for small children. The secret to writing under all those conditions was having a schedule and sticking to it.”

And on not sticking to that routine all the time:

"A little imprisonment – if it’s of your own making – can set you free… Best of all is when your days pretty much have the same shape, the days that don’t have that shape become even more interesting. There’s nothing like a good prison break, and playing hooky isn’t as fun if you never go to school.”

Focus on the verb, not the noun:

“If you wait for someone to give you a job title before you do the work, you might never get to do the work at all. You can’t wait around for someone to call you an artist before you make art. You’ll never make it.”

A formula for artistic freedom:

“Do what you love” + low overheads = good life

“Do what you love” + “I deserve nice things” = a time bomb

Why you already have all you need:

“It is easy to assume that if only you could trade your ordinary life for a new one, all your creative problems would be solved. If only you could quit your day job, move to a hip city, rent the perfect studio, and fall in with the right gang of brilliant misfits!

“[But] you do not need to have an extraordinary life to make extraordinary work. Everything you need to make extraordinary art can be found in your everyday life.. The first step toward transforming your life into art is to start paying more attention to it.”