Book Review - Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's taken me almost a month to write this review. And I feel like I'm still trying to wrap my head around this book - in a good way, not a bad one. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I am attempting to implement and follow the advice within it. But, I keep bumping up against this internal wall I have about sharing things in progress. For reasons that would probably require a psychologist to decipher I have an aversion to showing/discussing anything from a work in progress to my plans for next month (or even tomorrow). I'd rather just do it and then share the result; having hidden all the messy meandering between the beginning and the end.

However, I'm sure that the admonitions in Show Your Work are right and true and good, not only because they feel that way, but also because I know I enjoy finding out about the people and the process behind the writers I like. I enjoy watching YouTube videos about what they're currently reading, or how they're keeping sane during lock-down (or reading about their real lives in the case of the long dead ones). Kleon is right - there is something about being a human being that makes us all nosy about each other and curious about how people do things. We actually do want to see how the sausage is made - we're weird like that. This is a great book, and the perfect one for me to try to learn from, but I admit it certainly does feel totally foreign to try to implement. Wish me luck!

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