Search Results for: log book

GRAPHIC FACILITATION

Friday, January 27, 2006

While browsing Drew Dernavich’s website (his woodcut-like comics regularly appear in the New Yorker), I came across a page labelled “Graphic Facilitation.” On this page, Drew has examples of drawings and charts he’s done in real-time, sometimes on foam board, sometimes on white board, to capture the content of lectures, business meetings, and conferences.

Now, I’ve been doing this kind of thing in my notebooks for a while now, but I never knew it had a name, let alone that it’s an emerging field. Check out Peter Durand’s Center for Graphic Facilitation blog. There are registered Graphic Facilitators all around the country that are available for hire to “use visual learning to solve problems.” Here’s how to get started.

MATHEMATICAL STORYTELLING

Friday, January 20, 2006

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!

WOMAN’S WORLD BY GRAHAM RAWLE

Monday, January 2, 2006

Graham Rawle is a collage artist and writer. His latest book, Woman’s World, is a novel created entirely from fragments of text cut out of early 1960s women’s magazines. Meghan read about him in the latest issue of I.D. magazine:

First, Rawle wrote a straightforward novel. Then, Photoshop be damned, he used scissors and glue to clip words and phrases from the magazines. He catalogued the clippings thematically, scrapbook-style, in what amounted to 11 volumes of starter text. Finally, he went back and married the two, translating the original narrative using only the fragments he had collected, so that simple sentences like “What nonsense!” became “That’s all tosh and table margarine.” For Rawle, merging writing and design meant thinking obliquely about both. “Doing collage, you have to make do with what you’ve got,” he says. “When I make pictures, if I can’t find the right hat then I cut up a photo of a tomato.”

This is the kind of thing I want to do with my newspaper blackout comics poems. Outstanding.

11/8 MAC’S BACKS READING

Wednesday, November 9, 2005

A cool reading in the hot basement at Mac’s Backs last night, with fiction writers Kelly Link, Dan Chaon, and Maureen McHugh. Link is the editor of the literary magazine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, put out by Small Beer Press, which, along with Link’s book of short stories, MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS, published Maureen McHugh’s new book of short stories, MOTHERS AND OTHER MONSTERS. Dan Chaon teaches at Oberlin and lives right here in Cleveland Heights–his most recent book is the novel, YOU REMIND ME OF ME. I heard one of the audience members say, “Oh, God, it’s like the royalty of Cleveland writing here tonight…”

KELLY LINK

Link read the beginning of the title story from Magic for Beginners. She said the story was inspired from “watching a lot of Buffy reruns.” There was a lot of humor, and the world was engrossing, and the mother in the story was a librarian. Her book is good: “Stone Animals,” about a bunny invasion, really creeped me out. She brought along issue #17 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, so I picked up a copy of that.

DAN CHAON

“I heard Dave Eggers and Spike Jones are doing an adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are,” Chaon said. “So I called up Quentin Tarentino, and we’re going to collaborate on Goodnight, Moon.” Then Chaon read an unfinished story about a two-headed baby. My favorite line of the story was, “‘I think you’ve been blessed,’ the nurse said.”

After the reading, I was browsing the stacks, and Chaon pointed at me.

CHAON: You’re the Zagara’s guy.
ME: Uh, yeah, hi!
CHAON: It’s Austin, right? You’re a cartoonist?

And I’m thinking, how the hell does Dan Chaon know my name and that I draw cartoons? Turns out, someone pointed out this here blog, and one of the posts to him. (So, hi Dan, if you’re reading.) We talked about Zagaras being the true center of Cleveland literary activity, and I sheepishly tried to convince him that I was REALLY a short story writer, and he introduced me to one of his students who was doing a graphic novel in his workshop, which I thought was great: I wish I’d have done some comics in undergrad workshop.

MAUREEN McHUGH

McHugh started out by saying, “I think Dan and I must watch the same TV.” To which Chaon responded, “Oprah?”

McHugh is currently writing for the gaming industry. “Art is a product of technology,” she said. “The novel only became an art form after the printing press made it cheap to make a book…we’re still figuring out the computer.” She read four stories she’s written for the website lastcallpoker.com, aimed at the site’s target demographic of males 18-34. The first story was about a lesbian ninja named spider. “That’s A Funny Place For A Canoe,” was about a serial killer who shoots a hispanic drug dealer in the head on a street corner. For the third story, McHugh “had to become Elmore Leonard.” “Grind Up Your Bones For Bread” was about a computer hacker named Matt whose plot resembled the life story of William Bonny (aka Billy the Kidd). McHugh had cool postcards with her story “Wicked” printed on the front–I’ve always wondered why more authors don’t do promotional postcards/samples, like visual artists. She ended by holding up her new book and saying, “And if you think the stories in here are going to be anything like what I just read, you’re in for a big surprise!”

And so, there you have it: best reading since McSweeney’s hit Joseph-Beth a couple months ago. Next week: Charles Baxter at Lakewood Public Library.

INFINITE CANVAS

Friday, November 4, 2005

I’ve been drawing with my tablet pen in Flash recently, and I’m absolutely hooked on vector-based drawing. Drawing with vectors in Flash, you are free from the restrictions of resolution, so you can lay out panels on an 8 x 11 page meant for print, but then you can mega zoom inside each panel and draw in whatever level detail you want. This has worked great for traditional layouts, but I’ve been looking into other possibilites of using Flash for comics…

In REINVENTING COMICS, Scott McCloud coined the concept of the “infinite canvas.” (Check out this page where McCloud “continues his thinking” about the book.) Because of technology like Flash animation, the size of a digital comics page is theoretically infinite, so comics presented online shouldn’t be limited by conventional page sizes. An artist could conceivably display a complete comics story of indefinite length on a single page…

…enter the Tarquin Engine, a Flash-based template created by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey. With Tarquin, you can make huge, labyrinth-like comics with dead ends and web-like paths, that automatically zoom when you click the panels. A prime example of what the Tarquin Engine can do, here. Some other hypercomics, here. I’m tempted by hypercomics, and some online literary magazines like Born Magazine even encourage Flash-based literary endeavors, but on the other hand, I wonder if we shouldn’t just head back to the copy machine.