Here’s the rub about comics and storytelling:
Say you start with this panel. What comes next?
I’ve got it in my head that I want the next panel to be a husband watching his wife mow the lawn.
What if he’s sitting on the porch drinking a beer?
What if he’s getting out of his BMW in a suit and tie?
What if he’s sitting in a wheelchair?
Line by line, panel by panel, everything hinges on these tiny decisions.
Thinking about giant aunt and uncle sculptures made out of mashed potatoes and chicken gravy. Nouns, verbs, articles…teaching myself English. Wasted words. Rhythm. Studio 360. Kurt Anderson reading my journals. Electronic ink. Nicholson Baker, getting a character’s inner thoughts:
How clumsy, how broad, how expensive these cinematographic sign-systems seem, when compared to the dental trays full of pryers and pickers and angled mirrors that are the fiction writer’s rightful inheritance. Any mind Tolstoy wants to enter, he enters. It costs him nothing but a drop of ink….All the camera angles in the world couldn’t help you there.
Stories structured by an event. Ordinary passage of time. Repetition. Smoking into a wood-burning stove.
* title by Nicholson Baker
no explanation for this.
For a while now, I’ve been interested in bringing a mathematical method to storytelling: charting stories as graphs, using patterns, symmetry, proportion, and number sequences to build and analyze structure, etc. I want to make writing fun for me again: I want to think of writing as building or shaping–something you do with your hands, something concrete.
Brian Kitely’s THE 3 A.M. EPIPHANY, a book of fiction exercises, has been helping me along this week. Kitely’s approach to teaching (here is the complete introduction to his book) 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.
Many of the exercises are constrained in the sense that you have to fit your writing into a pre-determined form or structure, and many of these come from OuLiPo: a group of mathematicians and storytellers founded in 1960 (Italo Calvino was a member) who seek to create fiction with constrained techniques (writing without the letter “e” for instance, or only using anagrams). Here’s the site for The OuLiPo Compendium, and here’s a blog dedicated to constrained writing and OuLiPo. I became a fan of using constrained methods after taking a playwriting class focused intensely on structure, where we used many OuLiPo-like methods.
Structure is everything!
click to make it bigger adapted from Brian Kitely’s 3 a.m. epiphany
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