At last week’s VizThink Austin (@VizThinkAustin on Twitter) my friend Sunni Brown asked me to give a variation of my Visual Thinking for Writers talk. Little did I know that Chris Haro of Mighty Pretty Media was going to be there taping, and he was kind enough to allow me to post it all online. I can’t imagine how much time it took him to edit 40 minutes worth of video, so thank you, Chris!

In the first three videos, I talk way too much about my writing background, then get on to good stuff, like how to use index cards to brainstorm ideas, using graphs to understand story structure, and the power of adding captions to pictures.

Thanks to Sunni, Chris, and the amazing group of folks who came out to listen to me chatter on! Here are some iPhone pics I took of them in action:

Y’all rock. I hope that those of you in the Austin area will come to the next Vizthink.

You can watch the videos below or in this Youtube playlist.

On my writing background

On discovering comics, visual thinking, and information design

From writer’s block to Newspaper Blackout

Linear vs. non-linear process

On index cards

On story structure and Kurt Vonnegut’s story charts

The power of captions, and putting pictures and words together

In November I taught my second online course for Vizthink, “Visual Thinking for Writers.”

[ Description  ] [ Buy It ]

It was a catalogue of techniques I’ve discovered over the past couple of years that have helped me with my own writing.

I thought up the course after thinking a lot about the tools writers use, and how young writers are often scoffed at in Q&A sessions when they ask things like “Do you write by hand or on a computer?”

In my experience, it’s not a silly question at all: tools -> process -> writing.

The way you work is important.

My main idea was that the best thing you can do for your writing is step away from the computer, spend $10 in the school supply aisle of your local grocery store, and start making writing with your hands. (See this Wall Street Journal article that asked novelists how they write — well over half of them start with handwritten notes, index cards, etc.) If I was going to teach the workshop in the flesh, I would simply organize it by pens, index cards, post-it notes, scissors, tape, etc.

Here’s a reading list of blog posts I used as inspiration:

• Lay It All Out Where You Can Look At It
• Get Yourself A Calendar
• Mind Maps: Pictures and Words In Space
• Comics Without Pictures
• Writing The Fibonacci Sonnet
• Tools
• How-To Books
• Graph a Story with Mr. Vonnegut
• Maps of Fictional Worlds
• Writing on the Walls

I’ve posted some of my slides below.

UPDATE: Here’s some really nice praise from one of the webinar participants:

Austin Kleon’s webinar was engaging, energetic, and expert. My colleague and I went into the webinar thinking we were getting a $60 presentation. What we got was a learning experience that was intelligent, interesting, fresh, funny — yet grounded in solid research about the ways people think about and respond to their worlds. And it’s *immediately applicable* to both our professional and personal lives! If this is what VizThinkU provides, we’ll be back — a lot.- Denise Dilworth, Content Strategist

Last week Meg and I drove out to San Angelo, Texas. My friend Laurence Musgrove had invited me out to Angelo State to give a talk to a poetry class and conduct a blackout poetry workshop. The idea was to have a kind of “warm up” presentation to get ideas for any book tour I might do. This is the first time I had done anything like this, and how it went far exceeded my expectations. The students were great: they were engaged, eager, and they asked awesome questions. (Laurence posted a great Flickr set of the workshop – the photos in this post are his.)

Below I’ve posted the complete slideshow:

Here I am hating on Microsoft Word:

Here’s how the workshop went:

• I taped newspaper broadsheets to the walls and gave everyone a marker
• We formed a line, and I started by circling one anchor word or phrase
• The next person in line was instructed to build off that anchor phrase
• We kept going until poems emerged

The challenge, as always, was to get the students circling concrete nouns and verbs — words that put images in the head.

This combo made us all chuckle:

We only had a half hour or so, so we didn’t get any finished poems, but I promised everybody I’d go home and see what I could get out of the work we started. I’ll post the results here when I get a chance.

Thanks to Laurence, Angelo State, and all the great students!

I’m hoping we can do more of these workshops after the book comes out.

MODERN ART = I COULD DO THAT + YEAH, BUT YOU DIDN’T—“Modern Art” from More New Math by Craig Damrauer

It’s said in different sentences.

“An idea so simple I can’t believe nobody thought of it before.”

“I could’ve done that.”

“Any idiot could do that.”

“I’m sure you’re not the first person to put Sharpie to newspaper.”

(That last one came from a trollish e-mail I got last week.)

If you have a good idea and it’s well-executed, it looks effortless. It looks like it’s been around forever.

But I don’t want it to look effortless! you say. I want it to look as hard as I worked on it.

No, you don’t. You want it to look easy.

Bob Gill says it best, in Graphic Design As A Second Language:

There’s nothing more embarrassing than a juggler who always looks as if he’s about to drop whatever he’s juggling.

By my standards, however difficult it is to make art, it should always look easy, never labored. That’s what I mean by inevitable.

After the curtain came down on a Paddy Chayefsky play, the person sitting next to me got up and complained to his wife, “what’s the big deal? I cudda written that.”

I assumed that what he meant, was that he was not aware of anything the playwright actually did. It was as if the playwright simply pressed the on button of a tape recorder, so that the characters in the play were so convincing, was its strength.

This is what I try for. I like the idea that if I’m successful, the guy who sat next to me that night, would have the same reaction to my work, as he did with Chayefsky’s.

But perhaps the reason ideas seem “inevitable” is because they are:

Every idea is a juxtaposition. That’s it. A juxtaposition of existing concepts. —Steven Grant

The idea maker is a collage artist. You put two ideas together, and you get a third new one.

The trick, as Grant writes, is to fill your head with many ideas (reading is the best way to do this), and keep the ones that appeal to you.

Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.—Jim Jarmusch

The next step is to put them up against each other—to find patterns. The third and final step is to do create your collage, to fuse the ideas so seemlessly that it seems effortless.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.— T.S. Eliot, 1920, The Sacred Wood

Of course, sometimes you don’t need a good idea. Sometimes the only thing you have to do is give an existing idea a good name (“an idea is gold / only if you name it“):

It was an idea that was already out there, but I shined a spotlight on it, named it, and everybody got it right away.— Sam Martin

It’s all very much like making a blackout poem, actually: you sift through words, pick the ones you like, find the pattern of words that work good together, and blackout the rest into one coherent piece.

If you did it well, it looks easy.

This one is dedicated to Tom Hart, whose “How To Say Everything” I am currently devouring.

Pre-order the book

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.—Louis Menand, “Show or Tell: Should creative writing be taught?“

For me, the question isn’t should, it’s how.

How should creative writing be taught?

In The 3 A.M Epiphany, Brian Kitely writes that his approach is to make the creative writing workshop a workshop in the sense of an artist or carpenter: “a light, airy room full of tools and raw materials where most of the work is hands-on.”

The standard American workshop is a lazy construction. The teacher asks students to bring in stories or poems to class, sometimes copied and handed out ahead of time, sometimes not. The class and its final arbiter (usually the teacher) judge the merits of the story or poem. Few ask the question, “Where does a story come from?” The standard American workshop presumes that you cannot teach creativity or instincts or beginnings. It takes what it can once the process has already been started. Most writing teachers say, “Okay, bring in a story and we’ll take it apart and put it back together again.” I say, “Let’s see what we can do to find some stories.” The average workshop is often a profoundly conservative force in fiction writers’ lives, encouraging the simplifying and routinizing of stories….I use exercises in my workshops to derange student stories, to find new possibilities, to foster strangeness and irregularity, as much as to encourage revision and cleaning up after yourself, and I don’t worry much about success or failure.

I don’t really like doing exercises, I like playing games. My own philosophy is: “if writing isn’t a joy for the writer to write, it won’t be a joy for the reader to read.” So, I’ve spent the majority of my recent writing life trying to turn writing into a game—to push it explicitly towards play. (Like, ahem, using newspapers and markers to make poems…)

[Note: for more on writing as a game, read up on OuLiPo.]

No one has influenced my thinking about this more than the writer and cartoonist Lynda Barry, who I met in 2006. She has dedicated her to most-recent work to the question, “Where do stories come from?”, first in her book, One! Hundred! Demons!, where she used a japanese sumi-e brush to draw her “demons,” and second in her amazing collage-art/comix-memoir/writing textbook, What It is.

a page from What It Is

From an interview with the Comics Reporter:

What It Is is based on something I learned from my teacher, Marilyn Frasca, at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. I studied with her for two years in the late 1970s. Her idea seemed to be that everything we call art, whether it’s music or dance or writing or painting, anything we call art is a container for something she called an image. And she believed that once you understood what an image is, then the form you give it is up to you.

The question “What is an Image?” has guided all of my work for over 30 years. Because of what I learned from Marilyn, there isn’t much of a difference in the experience of painting a picture, writing a novel, making a comic strip, reading a poem or listening to a song. The containers are different, but the lively thing in the center is what I’m interested in.

Can you teach creativity? Maybe not, but you can teach people what the energy flow of creating something feels like (hint: it’s no different from how you felt smashing GI Joes together in the driveway), and once you’ve felt that energy, you can set up processes to help you tap into that energy.

Once you know how to drink from that tap, then it’s only a matter of spending a bunch of time with a paintbrush, or a guitar, or an arc welder.

And to get back to the Kitely quote, “don’t worry much about success or failure.” This is a really important point. There’s a place for creating for writing for the sheer joy of writing, and there’s a place for figuring out whether it’s any good or not. In Lynda’s workshop, there is nothing but encouragement. No place for criticism.

My own stance is that art isn’t made by committee. If you want to know whether your stuff is any good, get a big bunch of readers (not just teachers [people paid to read your writing] or students [people paying to read your writing]), and see what happens. The way I did this was by starting a blog—by putting my stuff up for free on the internet.

The key ingredient in all this is time. You need time to get good, and you need time to build a readership.

So if it’s going to take time, how do you feed and clothe yourself after college?

The answer: get a day job and keep it.

I just finished Hugh MacLeod‘s great new book, Ignore Everybody. Hugh has said the book is “advice I wish I had when I was in my early 20s that I learned the hard way after many years. I had just finished college and I had a creative bug, but I had no way to make a living doing it.” It sprung from his piece “How To Be Creative,” which was a big deal to me when I found it a year or so ago, specifically for his “Sex and Cash Theory.”

The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.

Once you let go of the idea of making your money primarily by being an artist, you’re set free. You can make what you want. Get a day job, work 9-5, and squirrel a few hours each day away for your writing, drawing, whatever. Start a blog, so you have an outlet. Once your art is making more money than your day job, you can quit (I sure as heck still work my 9-5…)

My big question, which I’ve asked of many writers, and many have been unable to answer, is: how can you be a decent family man and also be an artist?

Many of our favorite writers/artists weren’t so great as human beings. They couldn’t keep their marriages together, they neglected their kids, they lost their friends—all in sacrifice to their art.

The world needs more great human beings. It doesn’t necessarily need more artists.

I haven’t found many great books on balancing art and family. I have a sneaking suspicion that any such books have been written by women. (Maybe you can suggest a couple?)

The one book I have read that’s helped me out is Bruce Holland Rogers’ Word Work. There are three great chapters on relationships in that book: “Writers and Lovers,” “Writers Loving Writers,” and “Writers Loving Non-Writers.”

So anyways, when it comes to ways to teach writing and teaching folks how to be writers, you could do a lot worse than to buy these books:

• Lynda Barry, What It is
• Hugh Macleod, Ignore Everybody
• Bruce Holland Rogers, Word Work
• Brian Kitely, The 3 A.M Epiphany

Let me know what you think and please list your favorite writing/creativity books in the comments!

res-i-due
noun
a substance that remains after a process such as combustion or evaporation

These are the back and front covers of the notebook I carried around to make, record (see my calendar and checklist), and store all of my blackout poems. I used the back cover (above) to absorb all the marker bleed, and it still reeks from the fumes of hundreds of poems.

The front cover says, “If it isn’t play, what good is it?” and has a quote from Henri Cartier-Bresson:

…we deal in things that are continually vanishing…and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on Earth that can make them come back again…

For photography, this is true: if you don’t snap the shutter at the right time, the moment has vanished.

For blackouts, it’s similar—mark over the wrong word, and it’s gone forever—but also different: as for moments in life that have vanished, blackout poems are the “contrivance” that can make them come back again.

William Burroughs claimed that cut-ups were a form of time-travel, and it’s no coincidence that the second poem in my book is about instructions for a time machine.

I’ve spent the last six months dipping into the pensieve. Now it’s time to move forward, think about the future. Discover the the next project.

How do you fill the empty nest?

I’m about to finish up the first draft of my manuscript and send it off to my editor.

Last night my wife and I were talking about the book, the book only she and I have read, and I asked her, “Is it something you’d want to read?”

A cliched piece of writing advice is to “write what you know,” but really, this is terrible advice. The late, great John Gardner tells us:

Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche’s censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully and interestingly about one’s own home town, one’s Episcopalian mother, one’s crippled younger sister. For some writers, the advice may work, but when it does, it usually works by a curious accident: The writer writes well about what he knows because he has read primarily fiction of this kind–realistic fiction of the sort we associate with The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, or Harper’s. The writer, in other words, is presenting not so much what he knows about life as what he knows about a particular literary genre. A better answer, though still not an ideal one, might have been “Write the kind of story you know and like best–a ghost story, a science-fiction piece, a realistic story about your childhood, or whatever.”

Though the fact is not always obvious at a glance when we look at works of art very close to us in time, the artist’s primary unit of thought–his primary conscious or unconscious basis for selecting and organizing the details of his work–is genre.”

Not write what you know. Write what you like.

Bradford Cox, lead singer of the band Deerhunter (a new favorite of mine — get their album Microcastle) recently commented on his blog about the leak of the new Animal Collective album:

Back in the 90’s when I was first starting to make 4-track tapes I had a game where I would make a fake version of an album I was anticipating. If Pavement’s Brighten the Corners were (sic) coming out soon, I had to wait till release day to hear it. I would record a set of songs that I would want the Pavement album to sound like. Some of those songs ended up becoming Atlas Sound and Deerhunter songs years later.

My advice to those who are so desperate for AC’s album to leak is to pick up instruments and make your own version of what you would want it to sound like. Respect the BANDS wishes and wait till release day. Then you can compare your new songs with theirs. Who knows. Maybe your album will be the one people are wanting to leak next year.

I’m reminded of the last Dirty Projectors album, where Dave Longstreth found an empty cassette case of Black Flag’s Damaged and recreated the album from memory.

The manifesto is this: draw the art you want to see, make the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read.

Adapted from John Medina‘s cool book, Brain Rules:

1. EXERCISE boosts brain power.

Moving around gets more blood and oxygen pumping to the brain, which gives you more ideas. (See Haruki Murakami’s essay on writing and running in the New Yorker.)

4. We don’t pay ATTENTION to boring things.

Elmore Leonard says, “Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.” Kurt Vonnegut called it “being a good date.”

7. SLEEP well, think well.

Get plenty of shut eye, and figure out when you’re most creative: it’s probably either early in the morning or late at night. NO ONE is creative during the mid-afternoon, and that’s why some of the greatest thinkers of all time were notorious for 3PM naps. (Salvador Dali napped with a spoon.) Hit a snag? Sleep on it: our brain is constantly working things out in our sleep. Keep a dream journal.

9. Stimulate more of THE SENSES.

Pictures and words belong together. Write by hand with a pen or paintbrush. Cut words out of magazines. Use a Sharpie and a newspaper….

10. VISION trumps all the other senses.

Words are seen, and stories are images.

12. We are powerful and natural EXPLORERS.

Even at an old age, our brain is still malleable. We can still learn new things and improve. It ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Links:

• Brain rules for PowerPoint & Keynote presenters
• Visit the Brain Rules Website
• Buy the book on Amazon

Jessica Abel and Matt Madden were in town this weekend to promote Jessica’s La Perdida and Life Sucks, and their brand-new comics textbook collaboration, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures (great title). Yesterday they talked about the books (in that order) at Austin Books and Comics. There was a small crowd, not much A/C, and a keg of beer!

The biggest treat was that we got to buy a copy of the new textbook, which doesn’t officially come out for a week or so:

Some things I took away from their talk:

• Jessica’s early stuff was drawn with a pen very realistically, with tons of detail, so for La Perdida, she went for a sketchy, brush drawn look, which she thought turned out to be more realistic, because readers could fill in the world around the significant, selected details. This came out as sort of an off-the-cuff remark, but as Meg pointed out to me, it’s one of the most important lessons of comics: less is sometimes more, and since every comic drawing is a visual metaphor, there’s a balancing act when it comes to the level of abstraction in your drawings (see McCloud).

After she said that, when I was flipping through the book I found this cool example:

• Meg mentioned how much the technical skills (pencilling, layout, inking) of comics resemble architecture. That got me thinking: someone who wanted to study comics in a traditional academic setting would likely first think to seek out say, life-drawing and creative writing classes, which are fine, but they might be better served by design (typography, page layout, the grid), screenwriting (dialogue, visual storytelling), or poetry (economy of words, laying them out in space).
• Their book is aimed at three different types of comics creators:
  1. Students in the classroom
  2. Ronin — lone warriors out on their own
  3. Nomads — small groups (i.e. a writing group that meets once a week at a coffee shop)

  The book is formatted so that each type of creator can benefit from the lessons.

• Men seem to like the idea of having a separate studio space away from the house, while women seem to prefer a room at home. (At least it’s the same for Meg and me. Discuss.)
• Matt and Jessica have a new baby, and Meg noted that people always seem to ask “male-oriented” questions at those events—she wanted to ask how you keep a house running and still find time to create (but didn’t…and it would’ve been a great question, too!)
• Comics is a language, people!
• Jessica’s #1 productivity tip: get a calendar, and stick to it! (More details)

Since both Matt and Jessica are teachers at SVA, I asked them if they saw any pitfalls, teaching comics in the academy. Is there a chance that comics programs could turn out like MFA writing programs, with students turning out uniform, quiet, lit’ry, “workshopped” New Yorker types of short stories?

They both agreed that “it all comes down to the teachers,” and “if comics can’t withstand being taught in the academy, what kind of medium is it?”

I mentioned Lynda Barry’s new book as a great antidote to the “bad” kind of creative writing teaching, and Matt had a great reply:

(He was referring to Lynda’s art teacher in college, Marilyn Frasca.)

Overall, I think this book is extremely well done and worth checking out by anyone who’s interested in making comics—it’s probably the first book I’ve ever seen that could actually serve as the lone textbook for a comics-making class. I think it will sell like hotcakes, and, as Jessica and Matt hinted, we’ll definitely see a sequel focusing on “advanced” topics such as coloring and webcomics.

My complete notes from the talk, if anyone’s interested:

Thanks to Matt and Jessica for swinging down to Austin!