The book in a nutshell
Published in 2012, Steal Like an Artist grew out of a talk Austin Kleon gave to students, about the advice he wished he had received when he was starting out. A writer and artist known for his newspaper blackout poems, made by blacking out words in newspaper articles, he defends a reassuring idea: nobody creates from nothing, and learning to borrow well is the real starting point of any work.
The short, illustrated book became a bestseller and launched a series continued with Show Your Work!, already summarized in our catalog. Here are the five ideas that make it a little creativity manual for everyone, and how to apply them.
Nothing is original, so steal well
Austin Kleon starts from a liberating observation: no idea comes out of nowhere, every creation is a remix of what came before. Artists do not invent from a void, they collect, assemble and transform. Letting go of the quest for absolute originality removes the main obstacle to creating.
The next step is to tell good theft from bad theft. Kleon contrasts them point by point: good theft honors, bad theft degrades; good theft studies, bad theft skims; good theft steals from many, bad theft from one; good theft credits, bad theft plagiarizes; good theft transforms, bad theft imitates. Copying a single model produces a knockoff. Drawing on dozens of influences, digesting them and mixing them produces something that looks like you. The practical rule that follows: do not ask whether your idea is new, ask whether you have enough sources for it to become your own.
You are the sum of your influences: choose many of them, and transform them instead of copying them.
Build your creative family tree
Since you are made of what you let in, Kleon advises you to consciously choose your creative ancestors. His method is simple: pick a thinker or artist you admire, study everything they did, then find the people they admired, and repeat. By climbing the tree, you build a family of influences that belongs only to you.
To feed this collection, he recommends always carrying a notebook and keeping a "swipe file", a folder for everything that strikes you. And he encourages you to copy your heroes without hesitation, as apprentices do: not to reproduce their style, but to understand how they think. You do not copy to stop there, you copy to learn, until you fail at the imitation in a way that is uniquely yours. That gap is precisely what becomes your voice.
Choose your masters, climb their family tree and copy them until your clumsiness becomes your style.
Write the book you want to read
Kleon takes the opposite view of the classic advice "write what you know". Instead, he suggests you write what you like, and create the work you wish existed. If you feel a book, an app or an album is missing, you are probably the right person to make it.
His favorite exercise is to imagine the sequel your heroes never wrote: what would they do today, what could they have done better? This kind of unabashed fan fiction gives you a concrete starting point and avoids the blank page. It goes hand in hand with another piece of advice from the book: do not wait until you know who you are to get started. You discover your creative identity by making things, not by thinking before you make them. Kleon even recommends faking it at first, acting like the artist you want to be, because it is by playing the role that you end up inhabiting it.
The project you feel is missing is often the one only you can make: start it before you feel ready.
Use your hands and nurture side projects
For Kleon, screens impoverish creativity: creative work also goes through the body, and you need to get your hands back into it. Cutting, pasting, drawing and doodling awaken ideas that the keyboard does not bring out. He himself works with two desks: an analog desk with no screens at all, with paper, markers and newspapers, reserved for generating ideas, and a digital desk for editing and publishing.
He also champions side projects and hobbies, those low-stakes activities that seem to distract us from what matters. He talks about productive procrastination: when one project stalls, move to another rather than stopping. And he advises throwing no part of yourself away: passions that seem unrelated to your work often end up enriching it. The most interesting ideas frequently come from these unexpected crossovers between fields.
Step away from the screen and keep your side passions: that is where the ideas you were not looking for are born.
Be boring, and create by subtraction
The book's last piece of advice is surprising: to be creative, you are better off leading an orderly life. Kleon quotes Flaubert, who recommended being regular and orderly in your life so that you can be violent and original in your work. Routine protects creative energy: take care of your health, stay out of debt, keep your day job, work a little every day and track your progress on a calendar and in a logbook.
He closes on the idea that creativity is a matter of subtraction: faced with infinite possibilities, it is limits that move you forward. His most striking example is Dr. Seuss, who wrote Green Eggs and Ham after betting his publisher that he could write a book using only fifty different words. Little time, few resources, a strict framework: rather than excuses, these are constraints that force you to choose and to invent.
A steady life and embraced constraints free up creativity more than chaos and infinite possibilities.
Who should read this book?
This book is for you if you want to create but the fear of not being original paralyzes you, if you are waiting to feel legitimate before getting started, or if you are looking for simple habits to fuel your inspiration day to day. It suits artists as much as professionals who want to be more inventive in their work. Skip it if you are looking for a detailed method or an in-depth theory of creativity: Kleon offers short principles to reflect on and apply.
The covers shown differ from the original editions for rights reasons. The summaries are faithfully based on the works.
