Top 5 Books about Creativity

My favorites books about creativity. Some are more specific than others, but all them have a much wider application that any specific genre.

Let’s start with an absolute classic. The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. Hopefully you’ve read it or at least know about it. Procrastinating and fear and what stops us from making stuff, makes us delay getting started.

Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t. Another by Stephen Pressfield, about storytelling and structure and the Hero’s Journey. How we can and should apply it to most things we make. I pretty much keep reading this on repeat, one of the short chapters every week.

I could list any of the excellent little series by Austin Kleon, but let’s go with the first, Steal Like An Artist. How we find inspiration and borrow and take and combine to make our own art. Great insights made simple and accessible. Get these books if you haven’t already.

Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull is all about Pixar and how they’ve made some of the greatest animated movies. How they’ve developed and sustained and encouraged a creative culture within a growing organization. So much more about teamwork and making stuff with other people, which many of us either do or should do more of.

I hesitated on including On Writing by Stephen King because it is more about writing specifically. But it is also insights into a great creative mind, thoughts on his process and other approaches, techniques that he uses such as leaving months between writing and editing so that the book becomes unfamiliar again. Like Pressfield, it took him many years, many attempts, to ‘make it’. Perseverance, not just skill and technique.