Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad

Austin Kleon's Keep Going offers ten principles for sustaining a creative life through difficult and uncertain times. Kleon, a writer and artist, addresses the book primarily to fellow artists and writers but frames its ideas as useful for anyone, including entrepreneurs, teachers, students, and activists.

Kleon opens by describing the frustration that prompted the book. He found himself waking each morning, checking the news on his phone, and feeling the world had grown worse overnight. After more than a decade of making art, the work was not getting easier. He made peace with the possibility that it never would. Rather than offering a formula for success, he presents ten things that have helped him keep going, many borrowed from others.

The first principle, "Every Day Is Groundhog Day," rejects the idea of the creative life as a heroic journey. Kleon compares his daily experience not to Odysseus, the legendary hero of Homer's Odyssey, but to Phil Connors, the weatherman in the 1993 film Groundhog Day who wakes up trapped in the same day. The creative life is not linear but cyclical: a loop in which each project returns the artist to a new starting point. The truly prolific artists have solved this by developing a daily practice that insulates them from external chaos. Kleon advocates establishing a personal routine, citing Annie Dillard's idea that a schedule is "a net for catching days" (15), and references Mason Currey's Daily Rituals to illustrate that no universal routine exists. He champions list-making as a tool for reducing anxiety and closes the chapter with a call for self-forgiveness at the end of each day.

The second principle, "Build a Bliss Station," argues that creativity requires both connection to others and disconnection from the world. Drawing on Joseph Campbell's concept of the "bliss station" from The Power of Myth, Kleon urges readers to carve out a dedicated space or time free from news and outside demands. He warns against checking news first thing in the morning and introduces the idea that "airplane mode can be a way of life," profiling artist Nina Katchadourian's ongoing project Seat Assignment, in which she creates art during disconnected plane rides. He stresses the importance of saying no, contrasting FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) with JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out) and concluding that saying no to the world is sometimes the only way to say yes to one's art.

The third principle, "Forget the Noun, Do the Verb," urges creative people to focus on the act of making rather than on job titles or identities. Kleon warns that aspiring to be "a creative" can lead to signaling the identity rather than doing the work. He pivots to the concept of play, observing that his two-year-old son Jules cared nothing about finished drawings but was fully absorbed in the act of drawing itself. To recover this playfulness, Kleon suggests practicing without saving results, seeking unfamiliar tools, intentionally making bad art, and spending time around young children.

The fourth principle, "Make Gifts," addresses the danger of letting market forces consume creative practice. Kleon warns that turning a passion into a livelihood can destroy the love and advises keeping at least part of creative practice off-limits to the marketplace. Drawing on Lewis Hyde's The Gift, which argues that "where there is no gift, there is no art," he recommends making something specifically for someone to recover art's essential gift quality. Many beloved stories began as gifts for specific children, including A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.

The fifth principle, "The Ordinary + Extra Attention = The Extraordinary," argues that extraordinary art comes from paying close attention to everyday life. Kleon profiles Sister Mary Corita Kent, a nun and art teacher in 1960s Los Angeles who screen-printed images from advertisements and signs, transforming ordinary visual material into art. He cites other artists who made remarkable work from unremarkable circumstances, including Harvey Pekar, a file clerk who turned workplace stories into the comic American Splendor. Kleon advocates slowing down as essential to seeing and describes his daily diary as his primary method for tracking attention over time.

The sixth principle, "Slay the Art Monsters," contends that art should serve life, not the other way around. Borrowing the term "Art Monsters" from Jenny Offill's novel Dept. of Speculation, Kleon argues that the culture is rightly dismantling the myth that being an absent parent or abuser is a prerequisite for great work. Art's purpose is to make lives better. The world needs more decent human beings more than it needs more great artists.

The seventh principle, "You Are Allowed to Change Your Mind," argues that openness to uncertainty is essential to creative work. Kleon contends that American culture, amplified by social media's pressure to maintain a consistent personal "brand," treats changing one's mind as weakness. He cites writer Donald Barthelme's claim that the artist's natural state is one of "not-knowing" and advocates offline spaces for experimental thinking. Drawing on Alan Jacobs's How to Think, he distinguishes between "like-minded" people and "like-hearted" people, those who are temperamentally open and generous listeners. He also advocates reading old books as a way to escape contemporary groupthink.

The eighth principle, "When in Doubt, Tidy Up," recasts tidying as a creative strategy. Kleon pushes back against the decluttering movement popularized by Marie Kondo, arguing that for artists, mess is intentionally cultivated because creativity depends on unexpected connections. He borrows the culinary concept of mise en place, having tools and ingredients ready before cooking, from Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, distilling the key idea as readiness rather than perfect order. Tidying, for Kleon, is productive procrastination that busies the hands and loosens the mind. He discusses sleep and naps as forms of mental tidying and profiles writer David Sedaris, who spends hours daily picking up litter near his English village, connecting Sedaris's scavenging to his writing practice. Kleon challenges slogans like "Move fast and break things," proposing instead: "Leave things better than you found them."

The ninth principle, "Demons Hate Fresh Air," makes the case that walking outdoors is essential to creative thinking. Kleon catalogs a history of creative walkers, from Wallace Stevens composing poems on his commute to Thoreau's four-hour daily rambles. He relays filmmaker Ingmar Bergman's advice that "the demons hate fresh air," extending the metaphor to argue that walking combats not only inner demons like creative blocks but also the outer demons of corporations and marketers who benefit from keeping people glued to screens.

The tenth principle, "Plant Your Garden," argues that creativity, like nature, has seasons. Kleon returns to Sister Corita Kent, who after moving to Boston spent years watching a maple tree cycle through its seasons, comparing the tree's rhythms to her own creative life. He distinguishes between "annuals," early bloomers who may wither quickly, and "perennials," those who sustain creative lives over decades, citing photographer Bill Cunningham taking photos in his eighties and cellist Pablo Casals practicing every morning in his nineties. He addresses the political despair underlying the book by telling the story of Leonard Woolf, the writer and publisher married to Virginia Woolf. During the anxious months before World War II, Woolf refused to come inside to listen to one of Hitler's radio speeches, choosing instead to keep planting purple irises and declaring they would bloom long after Hitler was dead. Twenty-one years later, some of those irises still bloomed.

Kleon closes by instructing readers to return to the first chapter whenever life feels overwhelming. He reframes the book's priorities: Worry less about getting things done and more about things worth doing; worry less about being a great artist and more about being a good human being who makes art. The final pages consist of a litany of verbs reinforcing the book's emphasis on doing over being: keep working, playing, drawing, painting, singing, dancing, looking, listening, thinking, dreaming, exploring, giving, living, paying attention. The final imperative: "Keep going."