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YouTube has a plagiarism problem.
We spoke with @austinkleon to try and fix it
Watch ? https://t.co/rdZFPtCRAb pic.twitter.com/RdMNAfaAZp
— Colin and Samir ???? (@ColinandSamir) April 3, 2023
YouTubers Colin and Samir asked me if I would talk to them about plagiarism on YouTube. The resulting conversation was kind of a 20-minute summation of a lot of my thoughts about creative work.
You can watch the whole thing here:
Spoiler alert: My “solution” is not really a solution. LOL.
The solution to plagiarism on the internet
"If you're chasing after something else, you kinda have to get more serious than just ripping off other people's stuff."
(from @ColinandSamir's recent interview with Austin Kleon) pic.twitter.com/e22Sar18yI
— Jay Alto (@theJayAlto) April 3, 2023
I loved Henrik Karlsson’s piece, “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”
He writes:
A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people. It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.
So what do you write about to find your people?
You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
If you do this, Karlsson says, “You will write essays that almost no one likes…. Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.”
This is really a great summary of the best thing that writing and sharing your work can do for you.
One of the many things Lynda Barry has taught me: If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you.
“Going through the motions” is often thought of as a bad thing, but it is the artist’s great secret for getting started.
As I wrote in Steal Like an Artist:
If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking.
Get your pen moving, and something will come out. (It might be trash, but it will be something.)
For a comedic take on this, see: SpongeBob SquarePants.
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