"Don't Wait Until You Know Who You Are to Get Started"

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“Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.”

            Austin Kleon in Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.”( Workman, 2012.)

Steal Like An Artist is a book to keep close by you as you work.  Kelon’s first point among the ten is  “Steal Like An Artist.” He quotes from artists of all sorts. For example, Kobe Bryant, the basketball star, says, “There isn’t a good move that isn’t an old move.”  Bryant says that all his moves were copied from his heroes—he watched tapes of them until his could do what they did, but he had to adopt what he learned to his own body. So, it might be Michael Jordan as channeled by Kobe Bryant.

Kleon encourages us to bow toward and imitate our cultural ancestors until we have combined all of them into our own rich mixture.  “Nobody is born with a style or a voice. In the beginning we learn by pretending to be our heroes.”

 Yoko Ono says, “Start copying what you love. Copy. Copy. Copy. Copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.” Daunting on the one hand, but straightforward on the other. Pick someone you respect and copy.

Last summer I invited my students to copy, copy, copy the writer they most admired. The voices of Eudora Welty, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ernest Hemingway, channeled by my students, filled the room. How did the students accomplish this? They studied the machinery of each writer, examining the structure of the language, the voice, the inner workings of each sentence. Like taking a clock apart and putting it back together. My students learned a lot and the writing improved. And they got to spend a bunch of time with their heroes.

You too can do this. You just have to let go of your resistance to “stealing” and put on your analytic hat. Answer that question – how did he do it?

Exercise: Identify an author you admire. Take a couple of pages of her work and break it down. Read it aloud. How does she create sentences? Pronoun then verb—in that order or another? Does she repeat? Is her writing full of metaphor? If so, how does she pull the metaphors onto the page? And then read it aloud again. And again.

Print out the magnifying glass and go into the minute details of the workings of this machine.

Start a journal entry and, one page in, begin to imitate or “steal from” your designated author. Write in the same rhythm and choose a similar structure to the sentences. Write for three pages. And then go back to your own voice. What have you learned? Read your piece aloud.