Learning to see like your heroes #BlogJune

I think I’ve mentioned before how much I love @AustinKleon’s writing, and this is one of my favourite quotes from his book “Steal like an artist: 10 things no one ever told you about creativity.” The main point of this quote is that it’s fine to begin with imitating our favourite heroes, artists, mentors, but it needs to move beyond that. We need to not be content with imitating them (looking like them); we need to see things the way that they saw them and produce art like they might have (but with out own particular spin on it).

I suppose this also extends to professional practice; I’m sure we all have people that we look up to, or who we think about doing this whole librarian-thing really well. But we can’t be exactly like someone else; we have to put our own spin on it. But we can definitely learn from others before us, and the more influences we have – the better our own work will be!

So (at the risk of sounding like Buzzfeed) – you do you 🙂

Multiple influences = good theft. #BlogJune

from Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon

Recently I read Austin Kleon’s (@austinkleon) manifesto Steal like an artist: 10 things nobody told you about being creative and I found myself nodding along with every single page. The basic premise of the book is that you are a mash-up of all the influences in your life – basically, no one is truly *original*. I don’t know about you, but I find this idea so freeing – I don’t have to come up with something totally original, but instead expose myself to an eclectic mix of influences & remix them in a new & fresh way! Hopefully that is what this blog is…

So I love this list here where he talks about the difference between good theft & bad theft – we may start off with imitating our heroes, but we mustn’t stop there… Kleon (2012) notes:

“At some point, you”ll have to move from imitating your heroes to emulating them. Imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing.” (p. 38)

It made me think about academic study – well, I work in an academic library after all! The main thing that we, as librarians, try to get through to the students, is that they can’t just use one resource, or one point of view for their whole assignment. Their task is to read the literature, hear a variety of voices, and synthesize their points into their assignment. We are looking for nuances & understanding; not just a list of 20 different academic resources correctly cited in APA format.  That’s NOT what academic study is about – just citing resources correctly – but contributing to their research field. It’s an uphill battle, but a worthwhile one – hopefully we may contribute to producing creative scholars of the future!

Here’s a full list of the 10 things from Austin Kleon’s book – I could write a blog post about each one (not sure if I will, but it may well provide some more inspiration for #BlogJune).

from Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon

Seeing as this post does discuss academic writing *and* APA references, I figured I should put in a full & correct reference to Austin Kleon’s delightful book Steal like an artist: 10 things nobody told you about being creative. 😛 I know the hanging intent won’t play nice, and should I leave in the words “Publishing Company” or not? Anyway, here goes:

Kleon, A. (2012). Steal like an artist: 10 things nobody told you about being creative. New York, NY: Workman Publishing Company.