Steal Like an Artist

I was given a book a while back called Steal Like an Artist that detailed the author’s creative process as a novelist and cartoonist, the line between inspiration and theft, and how said line is about as thin as a walrus whisker. However, the key distinction author Austin Kleon makes in his separation of the two concepts is how well you can hide that this idea isn’t wholly yours -- not in the sense of scratching off the serial numbers and hastily repainting a jumped car, but rather in using the idea as a jumping-off point for further iteration [1]. The creative process is one of recycled and reiterated ideas, taking concepts proven to work in the past and finding new angles to look at them. As an example in games, Hidetaka Miyazaki, director of the Dark Souls series, is a huge fan of Kentaro Miura’s Berserk manga series. So much so that you can draw parallels to large swaths of Dark Souls back to Berserk rather easily. Yet no one claims Hidetaka Miyazaki is ripping off Berserk because he hid his inspiration well by reframing Berserk’s core theme of self-determination not as a question of “can this fictional character endure the challenges of an unfair and cruel world” but “Can you endure said challenges.

As creatives, we are constantly absorbing and engaging with our desired forms of media, and media will find its way into our work in one way or another. We should not be ashamed of this bleeding effect, nor should we shy away from paying homage to what inspired us in the first place. What we should be careful of, however, is that thin, barely visible line between creative genius and hack fraud, a line that gets more visible the more you examine your own work and inspirations. Examinations that require you to ask hard, sometimes critical questions of your art that may seem disheartening when asked, but they are the questions that get to the root of the work you’re trying to emulate, and once you find that core, you then have the knowledge to build your own work upon it and create something similar but distinct. Something that may end up inspiring someone else later down the line.    

[1] Kleon, Austin. Steal like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You about Being Creative. Workman Pub. Co, 2012.