41 pages • 1 hour read
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
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Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Use Your Hands.”
Kleon encourages artists to “bring [their] body into [their] work” (54) rather than being stationary at a computer. He recalls the rigidity of his college creative writing workshops, where his work consequentially suffered, versus his first book Newspaper Blackout, which engaged multiple senses and felt more like “play” than “work.”
While computers are good for editing ideas and preparing them for publication, Kleon thinks they hamper idea generation. He has an “analog” and a “digital” workstation: The analog desk has pens, markers, and paper, and the digital desk has his computer, laptop, and printer. This separation brings liveliness back to the creative process.
Chapter 4 Analysis
This chapter signals a move away from advice for idea creation and toward the physical and mental process of making art. Unlike the previous chapters, which mostly focused on reorienting readers’ preconceptions about art or guiding their intellectual processes, this chapter suggests physical practices that aid creativity. It introduces the tone of practical advice that will continue throughout the book.
One of the largest presences in Kleon’s novel is digital technology and Creativity in the Digital Age, which can either aid or hamper the creative process.
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