He’s been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS Newshour, and in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. His books have been translated into dozens of languages and have sold over a million copies worldwide. Kleon is also the author of Newspaper Blackout, a collection of poems made by redacting the newspaper with a permanent marker. Which is a problem you’re lucky to have, but it’s still a problem.Īustin Kleon is the New York Times bestselling author of a trilogy of books on creativity in the digital age, including Steal Like an Artist -now celebrating its 10th year in print- Show Your Work!, and Keep Going. It requires a real leap of imagination because you have to think about what happens when people start paying attention. Obscurity can be a real gift if you use it correctly.

Freedom is not necessarily the best thing ever for art there’s a tension between freedom and constraint out of which great art arises. Now, unlimited freedom can be very paralyzing, too. I mean, people worry so much about people being angry at them or doing the wrong thing, but obscurity can be this great gift. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about that, because I think the majority of us in the writing world are living in some version of it.Īustin Kleon: Well, you can just do whatever you want. But you make a great case for embracing obscurity and making productive use of it. Which most of us, even those of us who are published, might feel like we’re living in. So you just have to be really careful.īrad Listi: There’s a great part of Steal Like an Artist where you’re talking about obscurity.

If you get the wrong words, it encourages the wrong kind of action. In my case, you end up a self-help writer, which I never anticipated. Whatever it is, if you just like to write and put stories together, that keeps things open in a way that a certain particular noun doesn’t. You might end up a screenwriter you might end up a copywriter for an insurance company. Whereas if you just say I want to write stories, that is more open. If you say you want to be a novelist, that’s fine, but you’ll have an idea of what a novelist does and you’ll try to do that. This is one of the things I am really, really adamant about. Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!Īustin Kleon: It’s really important for people when they’re starting out to think about their verbs instead of their nouns. His trilogy of books on creativity in the digital age- Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work! , and Keep Going -are available from Workman Publishing.

Austin kleon trilogy