Creative Kleptomaniacs

Art is theft. — Pablo Picasso

What Austin Kleon calls “creative kleptomania” has been given many names by many different artists, writers, and makers throughout history. Sampling. Remixing. Uncreative writing. Plagiarism.

Whatever you call it, the idea at its core is simple, if abrasive: nothing we create is fully original. Everything builds on what came before; everything is happening under the influence.

It might sound frustrating at first, but I think it’s also liberating: we don’t have to write The Great American Novel or invent The One App to Rule Them All. We can find a new way to tell an old story, and still end up with something wildly creative, popular, and successful. We can combine a bunch of existing technology and still have created something that changes the world. Most of all, we’ve found a way to put our own stamp on something — originality born of stealing.

But to do this and really succeed, we have to find the time and space to make this kind of creativity a habit. We have to be constantly gathering ideas, collecting possibilities, and trying out various combinations and connections. Creativity is a routine.

This semester, we’re going to try an experiment: we’re going to see if we can make use of digital communication technology (smartphones) and social media (Instagram) to develop the habit of creative kleptomania.

Far too often, we hear that the Internet and our phones are making us stupid. Countless think pieces bemoan the demise of the almighty pen and paper, and predict the demise of all human civilization if we don’t get off our damn screens. Screens, we are told, disconnect us from each other, make us less capable of communication, pull us out of the “real world.”

What is, instead of just accepting that the digital will turn our brains to mush, we could find a way to make use of this technology to be more connected, and more aware of the world around us?

That’s what we’re going to try and do this semester with the Writer’s Journal. We are going to marry the analog writing prompts from Austin Kleon with digital documentation and sharing of those ideas. We’re going to try to enter a constant state of looking for ideas, and we’re going to use our screens to capture and share our creativity. Hopefully, the journal will give us places to look for ideas and inspiration and documenting and sharing those ideas holds us accountable to each other and ourselves, developing the habit. We do all this by making use of these devices on which we spend most of our time anyway; instead of succumbing to the allure of mindless scrolling, we are becoming active users, makers, creators of digital media.

Here’s how it’ll work, in practical terms. Your weekly entries in your Writer’s Journal will be a multi-step process:

Step One: Choose a prompt (ideally from the two suggested each week) and do it in the Kleon journal. Completing the exercise by hand is important; some can’t be replicated digitally, but more importantly, you are engaging with the physical parts of your brain, which are known to stimulate creativity. 

Step Two: Post a photo to Instagram, using our clashtag, that in some way captures the prompt for you. This may be a photo of something — an object, place, event, person — that came up in your prompt. This may be a selfie that reflects how the prompt makes you feel / think. It could be a borrowed photo (make it “Good Theft”) that embodies an idea or place you don’t have direct access to, but that relates to your prompt. Failing all else, you may take a photo of the page in your journal.

Step Three: By 5pm on Fridays of each week, write a blog post that explores any connections you can find between the prompt, the process, the picture, our class conversations, other digital artifacts, etc. You don’t have to reference all of those things in every single post. Think of the blog as the place you get to build a bridge between your creative kleptomania and our class in general, to reflect on how you might transform your ideas into digital stories. 

The goal in all of this is to move us from passive consumers of digital content to active creators of it. Stand up. Walk around. Don’t shed the screen– just put it to good use.