Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

This chapter pivots away from guiding readers through the creative process and toward how to engage with a wider contemporary creative community at all stages of the creative process. In doing so, his material starts to address concepts of audience, praise, and criticism, and intersects with the key theme of Creativity in the Digital Age. Some of Kleon’s advice on blogging and creating an online presence is now slightly outdated. This in itself shows the momentum and churn of the digital environment. His discussion of processes and approaches is relevant, however, and this chapter forms an important stage in the progressive argument that builds on ideas chapter by chapter.

Kleon identifies the main thing that hampers creativity once someone gains renown as pressure. Once someone has a body of work that has gained significant attention, a new series of pressures are put on that person. What will they make next and when? Can they create something as good as the last thing they created? The pressure continues through the creative process. After a creative person releases their next work, they might be subject to scrutiny on whether the quality of that thing lives up to their previous work, or whether the style or genre of their creation deviates too much from their previous work. These creative pressures are stacked on top of other pressures experienced because of renown, like increased scrutiny and observation of everyday life and habits and a loss of privacy. Kleon says, “There’s no pressure when you’re unknown. You can do whatever you want. Experiment. Do things just for the fun of it” (78). The unknown person creates for “fun” or “play” rather than “work.” Time stressors like needing to put out a new creative work to maintain one’s livelihood or public image or can hamper creative output. Kleon’s theory that obscurity creates freedom and a lack of pressure relies on the assumption that the creative individual has an alternative means of making money that will provide for their everyday necessities, like food and shelter. Within that implicit contingency however, he urges people to embrace the ability to creatively experiment without the scrutiny that follows fame.

His second piece of guidance is to accrue an online presence and let it be a “kick in the pants” for creativity (82). Kleon suggests that being online is valuable, as the internet can be a place to “publish your finished ideas” or a place for ideas to form and grow (82). He describes his own process of making a website, learning to code, figuring out “blogging,” and finding a creative community on Twitter (85), which has been known as X since July 2023. While many of Kleon’s observations about Creativity in the Digital Age and harnessing the power of the internet to aid creativity remain true, technology moves fast and Kleon’s observations are from the early 2010s, making them somewhat dated. Blogs were extremely popular forms of information and content sharing in the early 2010s: In this era, many types of people made blogs as a form of social networking. This era of blogging did not need to pay attention to things like “UX” (user interface) or “SEO” (search engine optimization) to find success and a wide audience. As of the 2020s, blogging has become far more professionalized and must attend to traffic optimization, appropriate ad models for a given brand, and optimizing SEO. Sites like Google, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and other search engines and social media sites all have “algorithms” that prioritize certain types of content for their users. For creatives working online, these new considerations likely create their own set of pressures, even for those working with the freedom of obscurity. Due to the fast-moving nature of technology, algorithmic considerations of the 2020s are bound to shift eventually too, giving creatives working online a new set of conditions to adapt to.