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

by Austin Kleon

“None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it.”

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim,”

When rapper Lil Wayne was in prison, I found myself envying his daily routine, which consisted of waking up at 11 a.m., drinking coffee, making phone calls, showering, reading fan mail, having lunch, making phone calls, reading, writing, having dinner, doing push-ups, listening to the radio, reading, and sleeping. “Man, I’ll bet I could get a lot of writing done if I went to prison,” I joked to my wife. (When I visited Alcatraz, I thought it would make the perfect writer’s colony. What a view!)

A day that seems like waste now might turn out to have a purpose or use or beauty to it later on. When the video-game artist Peter Chan was young, he loved to draw, but he would crumple up his “bad” drawings in fits of frustration. His father convinced him that if he laid the “bad” drawings flat instead of crumpling them up, he could fit more of them in the wastebasket. After his father died, Chan found a folder labeled “Peter” in his father’s possessions. When he looked inside, it was full of his old, discarded drawings. His father had snuck into his room and plucked the drawings he thought were worth saving from the wastebasket.

You must play a little hide-and-seek in order to produce something worth being found.

The director Francis Ford Coppola says he likes to work in the early morning because “no one’s gotten up yet or called me or hurt my feelings.”

“The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from.” —Lynda Barry

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes—including you.” —Anne Lamott

Creativity is just a tool.

Art and the artist both suffer most when the artist gets too heavy, too focused on results.

Write a poem and don’t show it to anybody. Tear it up into little pieces and throw them into the trash can. “You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.” That, said Vonnegut, was the whole purpose of making art: “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.” Vonnegut repeated variations of that advice throughout his life. He would suggest to his daughter Nanette that she should make a piece of art and burn it “as a spiritual exercise.” (There’s something cathartic about burning your work: Artist John Baldessari, disgusted by his previous work, had it all cremated and put in a ceremonial urn.)

“Do what you love” + low overhead = a good life. “Do what you love” + “I deserve nice things” = a time bomb.

“to breathe new life into the way we look at the ordinary things around us.”

When your job is to see things other people don’t, you have to slow down enough that you can actually look.

In an age obsessed with speed, slowing down requires special training.

We’re all going around in a “cloud of remembrance and anxiety,” he says, and the act of drawing helps us live in the moment and concentrate on what’s really in front of us.

Because drawing is really an exercise in seeing, you can suck at drawing and still get a ton out of it. In a blog post about picking up the habit of sketching later in his life, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, “By sitting somewhere and sketching something, I was forced to really look at it.” He said his drawings were “a means of experiencing a place or a moment more deeply.”

I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.”

Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, 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.

What you choose to pay attention to is the stuff your life and work will be made of. “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” psychologist William James wrote in 1890. “Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

If art begins with where we point our attention, a life is made out of paying attention to what we pay attention to.

“The world needs you at the party starting real conversations, saying, ‘I don’t know,’ and being kind.” —Charlie Kaufman

“We are excluded from no age, but we have access to them all,”

You’re often most creative when you’re the least productive.

“Solvitur ambulando,” said Diogenes the Cynic two millennia ago. “It is solved by walking.”

“Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”

Grab a plastic bag and a stick and take a litter-picking walk like David Sedaris.

The demons hate fresh air.

Corita Kent

Pablo Casals

There’s no time for despair. “The thing to rejoice in is the fact that one had the good fortune to be born,” said the poet Mark Strand. “The odds against being born are astronomical.” None of us know how many days we’ll have, so it’d be a shame to waste the ones we get.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language.