Austin Kleon: "I steal from everyone"
Austin Kleon is a writer and artist. He’s the author of Newspaper Blackout, a best-selling book of poetry made by redacting newspaper articles with a permanent marker. New York Magazine called the book “brilliant” and The New Yorker said the poems “resurrect the newspaper when everyone else is declaring it dead.” His new book is called Steal Like An Artist — a creative manifesto based on 10 things he wish he’d heard when he was starting out. His work has been featured on 20×200, NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS Newshour, and in The Wall Street Journal. He speaks about creativity, visual thinking, and being an artist online for organizations such as SXSW, TEDx, and The Economist. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Meghan, and their dog, Milo. Visit him online at www.austinkleon.com.
The name of your new book coming out in March is Steal Like an Artist? Who are your favorite sources to "steal" from? Which artists inspire you the most when creating Blackout Poems?
I steal from everyone, but I’ve stolen the most from Lynda Barry, Saul Steinberg, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ed Emberley.
You often quote authors and other public figures that condone and support plagiarism on your blog. Does that mean you are against copyrights?
I don’t condone plagiarism — plagiarism is passing off somebody’s work as your own. I call for stealing everything you can from the artists you admire, and then transforming their influence —the things you’ve stolen from them — into something that is new, something you can call your own. Transformation is key to everything.
I’m not against copyright — I think artists should be compensated for their work, but I find that copyright law, at least in the US, has gotten a bit out of control, and away from its original intention, which was to encourage creators to share their works in the name of progress.
Do you think it makes sense to be a writer today? Is the traditional way of writing books here to stay? Is the burgeoning volume of online content going to affect the writing of traditional books published physically?
It makes sense to be a writer because that’s what writers do: they try to make sense. The written word isn’t going away. Ways of writing, I’m sure are changing. I wrote a lot of my new book by paging back through my Tumblr, which is like a big scrapbook/database of stuff that’s inspired me. Of course, the internet and ebooks will continue to change the landscape of publishing, but I don’t think paper books are going away quite yet — there’s still a market for them, particularly beautifully produced and illustrated books.
Which literary genre is to become dominant, or, perhaps, is dominant, today? What changes are we going to see with the novel or the short story, classical genres of the 19th and 20th century?
Is the study of Creative Writing worth the time and effort? How does one learn to write well?
I learned a lot from taking creative writing classes in college — that said, I don’t think it’s a good idea to spend a lot of money or go into a bunch of debt for a creative writing program. If a program wants to pay you money to write for a few years, it can’t hurt. You get better at writing like you get better at anything else—practice.
What should the people of today even write about?
Same things they’ve always written about: love, death, etc. Whatever they want.
How much waste do you generate when you're "blacking-out"? Do you often black-out something you did not want to black-out? Do you keep some pieces hidden in your drawers for later publication?
Never thought of it as waste — in fact, the whole reason I started doing the blackout poems was because my wife and I had so many newspapers around the house, I felt like I should do something with them.
I make a lot of mistakes, yes, and I always throw poems I’m not quite sure of in a drawer, take them out later and look them over.
Should writers publish everything they write, and publish it immediately?
Good lord, no. Most of what I write isn’t worth publishing at all. Writing and publishing are two completely different things.
What way of promotion/marketing is the most suitable for an author? What all is there to be done in order to find your customers - readers?
Depends on the author, and depends on what kind of audience you want to reach. My suggestion in my book: “Do good work and share it with people.” That means: make the best work you can, and then put it on the internet. What people do with it is largely out of your control.
Would you be able to recommend three books everyone should read?
I don’t know that everyone should read them (people should read what they want) but three of my personal favorite books:
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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