Show Your Work 書評

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一、内容簡介

本書由美國作者Austin Kleon寫成的10篇有關自己在創作過程的一些攻略，建議和心得。大緻來說，作者列出了對自己的心态，對作品的心态，對他人的心态。

對待自己，要實事求事，虛心像優秀的人請教，有一個業餘者的心态，不給自己壓力。每兩到三年給自己放一次長假來進行自我充電。

對待作品，可以記錄産出結果的過程，而這個過程往往是我們的材料，也往往被我們忽略掉了。要每天記錄積累一點，最終積小成多。如果我們的作品對他人有價值，也可以不卑不亢的進行付費，這樣才能持續地源源不斷地讓我們産出優秀的作品。

對待他人，要樂于分享，可以教别人，這個過程也是我們學的過程，而且更能增加自己對正在教的東西的興趣。對于惡意評論的人，首先自己要有承受攻擊的心态，并且可以設置，拉黑等等操作來保護自己。

二、我的感觸

1. Be an amateur.

Amateurs might lack formal training, but they're all lifelong learners, and they make a point of learning in the open, so that others can learn from their failures and successes.

This is yet another trait of amateurs——they'll use whatever tools they can get their hands on to try to get their ideas into the world.

2. Read obituaries.

"I realized I was going to die," he says."Anad when that gets into your mind…it utterly changed me…I thought, I'm not going to sit here and wait for things to happen, I'm going to make them happen, and if people think I'm an idiot I don't care."

Reading about people who are dead now and did things with their lives makes me want to get up and do something decent with mine. Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live.

Try it: Start reading the obituaries every morning. Take inspiration from the people who muddled through life before you—they all started out as amateurs, and they got where they were going by making do with what they were given, and having the guts to put themselves out there. Follow their example.

3. Think process, not product.

This way of thinking is articulated by David Bayles and Ted Orland in their book, Art and Fear: “To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping the artwork.”

4. Become a documentarian of what you do.

Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal: Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook. Take a lot of photographs of your work at different stages in your process. Shoot video of you working. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones.

**Whether you share it or not, documenting and recording your process as you go along has its own rewards: You’ll start to see the work you’re doing more clearly and feel like you’re making progress. **And when you’re ready to share, you’ll have a surplus of material to choose from.

5. Trun your flow into stock.

When you detect these patterns, you can start gathering these bits and pieces and turn them into something bigger and more substantial. You can turn your flow into stock. For example, a lot of the ideas in this book started out as tweets, which then became blog posts, which then became book chapters. Small things, over time, can get big.

6. No guilty pleasures.

When you find things you genuinely enjoy, don’t let anyone else make you feel bad about it. Don’t feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy. Celebrate them. When you share your taste and your influences, have the guts to own all of it. Don’t give in to the pressure to self-edit too much. Don’t be the lame guys at the record store arguing over who’s the more “authentic” punk rock band. Don’t try to be hip or cool. Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.

7. Work doesn't speak for itself.

Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it.

“Why should we describe the frustrations and turning points in the lab, or all the hours of groundwork and failed images that precede the final outcomes?” asks artist Rachel Sussman. “Because, rarified exceptions aside, our audience is a human one, and humans want to connect. Personal stories can make the complex more tangible, spark associations, and offer entry into things that might otherwise leave one cold.”

“‘The cat sat on a mat’ is not a story. ‘The cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is a story.”—John le Carré

8. Teach people.

Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it. When you teach someone how to do your work, you are, in effect, generating more interest in your work. People feel closer to your work because you’re letting them in on what you know.

Best of all, when you share your knowledge and your work with others, you receive an education in return. Author Christopher Hitchens said that the great thing about putting out a book is that “it brings you into contact with people whose opinions you should have canvassed before you ever pressed pen to paper. They write to you. They telephone you. They come to your bookstore events and give you things to read that you should have read already.” He said that having his work out in the world was “a free education that goes on for a lifetime.”

9. Don't ask people to follow.

If you want followers, be someone worth following. Donald Barthelme supposedly said to one of his students, “Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?” This seems like a really mean thing to say, unless you think of the word interesting the way writer Lawrence Weschler does: For him, to be “interest-ing” is to be curious and attentive, and to practice “the continual projection of interest.” To put it more simply: If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.

It is actually true that life is all about “who you know.” But who you know is largely dependent on who you are and what you do, and the people you know can’t do anything for you if you’re not doing good work. “Connections don’t mean shit,” says record producer Steve Albini. “I’ve never had any connections that weren’t a natural outgrowth of doing things I was doing anyway.” Albini laments how many people waste time and energy trying to make connections instead of getting good at what they do, when “being good at things is the only thing that earns you clout or connections.”

Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.

Don’t be creepy. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t waste people’s time. Don’t ask too much. And don’t ever ever ask people to follow you. “Follow me back?” is the saddest question on the Internet.

10. Don't feed the trolls.

Because, of course, the worst troll is the one that lives in your head. It’s the voice that tells you you’re not good enough, that you suck, and that you’ll never amount to anything. It’s the voice that told me I’d never write another good word after becoming a father. It is one thing to have the troll in your brain, it is another thing to have a stranger hold a megaphone up to it and let it shout.

Do you have a troll problem? Use the block button on social media sites. Delete nasty comments. My wife is fond of saying, “If someone took a dump in your living room, you wouldn’t let it sit there, would you?” Nasty comments are the same—they should be scooped up and thrown in the trash.

三、本書特色

有很多金句值得思考，或者很有啟發，突然就點醒了一個人。例如：

"Every two or three years, I knock off for a while. That way, I'm constantly the new girl in the whorehouse."——Robert Mitchum

Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough," writes author Alain de Botton.

四、我的看法

這本書首先适合高中生學來提高自己的英語水平，句子不難理解，接近口語化。

整體來說，内容的思考深度不夠深入，一本很小的書，用兩天就能看完。