[How To] Steal Like An Artist

“The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from.”

David Bowie

If only every book could impart its wisdom as deftly, artfully, and swiftly as STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST, by Austin Kleon.

The book is easily read in one sitting but also feels designed to be flipped through at random whenever you need a creative kick in the pants.

My big takeaway?

We aren’t Human Beings — we are Human Synthesizers.

How many of my performers reading this started by imitating their heroes on their favorite albums?

Kleon says:

“The reason you copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds. That’s what you really want — to internalize their way of looking at the world.”

This is how we learn to walk: by watching others do it around us all day. Then one day, we take our first step and it isn’t mommy or daddy’s step…it’s our OWN.

The effectiveness and ultimate impact of our self-expression is directly related to how much we have fully integrated and “re-mixed” the self-expressions of others into our own experience. It’s the ultimate game of Telephone.

We aren’t to lament that there is “no new thing under the sun” but to delight in the wonder that we each carry our own special collection of influences that forge our unique creative fingerprint.

However, Kleon gives the warning of “Garbage in, Garbage out.”

We must be vigilant at the gates of our creative input (yes, mindless social media scrolling, I’m talking to YOU.)

The book is extremely liberating, validating, and I highly suggest owning a physical copy if you don’t already. The small, square layout combined with Kleon’s playful illustrations make it more of an experience than a read (pick up his follow-up SHARE YOUR WORK, while you’re at it!)

Want to see some of the concepts in action?

How I wrote my first musical

When I was in drama school at Carnegie Mellon, I knew I wanted to write a musical.

STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST hadn’t been written yet, but I knew that if this was gonna happen, then I needed to steal from someone — and fast.

Kleon talks about how you need to “stand next to the talent,” so why not choose the best of the best?

Sophomore year at CMU was very much “Shakespeare Year.”

Before cracking into the great scenes and monologues, our voice and speech professor, Don Wadsworth, had us each select a Sonnet. As our class analyzed, dissected, memorized, and eventually put them all together in a mini-performance, we learned that there was actually a secret cast of characters and a love-story woven through these 154 verses.

Bingo.

So I set about creating what would become my first musical: THE GREENWOOD TREE (back then, it was called SIGHS OF FIRE because that’s a quote from TWELFTH NIGHT and how very drama school of me).

True to Kleon’s belief that it is important that we “use our hands” and create a tactile experience in our process, I bought multiple copies of the Sonnets and ripped out the individual poems.

Shakespeare Confetti

I sat on the floor and randomly placed them around me.

I let my eyes wander while I’d underline certain passages, take notes, and basically dream over this gorgeous buffet of text. This was my “swipe-file,” as Kleon describes in the book.

Then I’d put the torn-out pages of poems into mini collections: these ones are about the creative process, these are about unrequited love, these are about the Dark Lady, these are about betrayal…

Through many long nights of shuffling the pages, a narrative became clearer and clearer.

In the book, Kleon talks about the power of subtraction (“choose what to leave out”), and much of this process was clearing away the poems that didn’t serve my storytelling — I couldn’t use them all. This became a very fun (read: obsessive) game. Musical Shakespeare sudoku.

The Remix

I did another trick found in STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST and “remixed” the concept even further by integrating a handful of the songs from Shakespeare’s plays (there are…a lot of them!) “O! Mistress Mine,” “Sigh No More, Ladies,” “Take O Take Those Lips Away,” “Who is Sylvia,” etc.

I even remixed things even more by throwing in Puck from A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. That would bring some variety, some magic, some mischief, and a familiar face for the audience amidst these “new” characters they’d be meeting.

The more I stole, the more it became entirely MINE.

It’s the day of the show, y’all

Kleon stresses that one of the most important elements of the creative process is SHARING the work.

Well, lucky for me, a brand new initiative called Playground was being launched at CMU, where classes would be canceled for a week while students committed themselves to independent projects — culminating in a weekend “festival” of art and new works. I had a deadline, I had an audience…I had no excuses.

THE GREENWOOD TREE has continued to grow ever since that first performance nearly 20 years ago.

It was seen at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2009 (starring a young up-and-comer named Jeremy Jordan), then a few years later at the Kennedy Center in a co-produced concert by Signature Theatre and Folger Shakespeare in DC, several workshops at the Musical Theatre Factory in NYC (where A STRANGE LOOP got its start) and then — before the pandemic — there was another workshop at one of the world’s most renowned homes for the works of Shakespeare, the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada.

Why did it feel so liberating to “steal?”

Whenever I sat down to work on the show, I had Shakespeare to hang out with!

I also felt a very real obligation not to let him down. This experience taught me firsthand what Kleon describes in his book — the page is never blank when we face it filled to the brim with the work of our heroes.

What is originality?

Undetected plagiarism.”

William Inge

Your Turn

Take a few minutes to journal on YOUR influences. Who are the creative voices that can give rise to your own?

More bluntly…who are you gonna steal from??

You’ll be joining a timeless chain of Human Synthesizers. The more you integrate the work that lights YOU up, the more you’ll create work that lights OTHERS up.

And, as always in these weekly chats — when I say “your work” or “your creative practice,” I’m also talking about your day-to-day conversations. Your actions.

Or, as I teach in my Inspired Actions course, every new breath is an opportunity to choose something DIFFERENT.

It’s not just good acting advice.

Want To Go Further?

BOOKS:
STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST, by Austin Kleon
SHOW YOUR WORK, by Austin Kleon

VIDEO
“Steal Like An Artist” — Austin Kleon at TEDxKC

AUDIO
SOUNDCLOUD: Demos from THE GREENWOOD TREE
SPOTIFY: “Sigh No More, Ladies” from Nikki Renee Daniels’ album HOME

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