In neat little rows in Adobe Bridge (which has been a total life-saver):
This is just the “yes” folder. It needs to be whittled down to 150 or less and sequenced.
52 in the “no/maybe/blog” folder.
224 total.
It’s still 26 shy of my goal of 250, but there’s only a month until the manuscript is due, so I might have to just end up short. So it goes.
Here’s what the Photoshop grunt-work looks like:
Wish me luck.
A lot of good entries this month, but the winner was Erica Westcott of Virginia Beach, VA, for her poem, “Enigma.”
I love the restraint Erica showed in this poem and the top-heavy black space. Here’s what she had to say about the making of it:
I am a mild mannered histology technician by day, and in my spare time I enjoy skydiving, knitting, and reading. After stumbling across your blog and admiring all the blackout poems, I thought I’d try my hand at one. They looked pretty easy, something to pass my lunch hour at work: just pick out a few words and string them together somehow, sort of like refrigerator magnet poetry. Wrong! I struggled for several days before coming up with something that sounded and looked just right. (Rarely is the structural appearance of what I write as important as the words themselves.) The subject matter of the original newspaper article was an amusing distraction, too. I never imagined the travails of a hostess — who knew! — mixed with a snippet of a second article could all be pared down and curiously transformed into poetry at the end.
Our runner-ups: Sarah Reyes from Newtown, PA, Brandon Weaver from La Mirada, CA, and Amy E. Hall from Franklin, TN.
Congratulations, Erica, Sarah, Brandon, and Amy! Y’all will get your free books next September.
And an honorable mention goes out to Nick Wiesneski, who just couldn’t get it together in time to make the deadline, but finished his poem anyways, and sent it in in-progress and completed:
You can see all the winners of the contest in the Newspaper Blackout Poems Flickr Pool, and add your own to the mix!
A big thank-you to everyone who entered the four contests. Y’all were great.
Posting around here for the next month or so might be pretty slow, as I’m in the home stretch of finishing up the book manuscript. If you’re dying for more blackout action, check out this interview I did via e-mail with Mitch Knox, a journalism student from Australia, where we discuss the contest, the book, and Garfield Minus Garfield, amongst other things.
And stay tuned for fun stuff planned for January! I’m thinking about having an international contest, where y’all can send me whatever you want (as long as it’s in English and I can read it). I’ll pick a winner, or winners, and send them a signed copy out of my own personal stash. So keep practicing!
Note: spurred on by Mark’s excellent comment on my “new house” post, I’m posting this excerpt from my undergrad thesis I wrote in the spring of 2005 (pre-blog). The thesis was called “Pictures Before Words,” and it was about using visual thinking techniques like clustering and storyboarding to create prose fiction. It’s surprising to read back through it now, and realize how much it laid out the ideas I would explore in the next 3 years or so: sense of place and writing as world-building, the connection between pictures and words…thanks to Sean Duncan for introducing me to a lot of the material!
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IN CHAPTER FOUR of Dylan Horrocks’ graphic novel, Hicksville, a character named Dylan Horrocks and a character named Grace travel to a land named Cornucopia to meet its greatest cartoonist, Emil Kopen. Upon their meeting, Kopen refers to himself not as a comics writer, but as a “cartographer” or a “maker of maps.” This puzzles Horrocks, and prompts Grace to ask Kopen to explain. Kopen says that comics are the same as maps because they are “using all of language—not only words or pictures.” Horrocks asks Kopen about the purpose of maps.
“Maps are of two kinds,” Kopen explains. “Some seek to represent the location of things in space. That is the first kind—the geography of space. But others represent the location of things in time—or perhaps their progression through time. These maps tell stories, which is to say they are the geography of time.”
This monologue is quite similar to Scott McCloud’s argument about comics in Reinventing Comics. He argues that space is the form of comics, and time the content: comics work by mapping time.
In Horrocks’ online article “Comics, Games and World-Building” (highly recommended) he responds to McCloud’s argument by exploring and expanding the theories of James Kochalka. In Kochalka’s comic, The Horrible Truth About Comics (included in The Cute Manifesto), he proposes an alternative definition of comics to McCloud’s: comics as world-building. “Comics are a way of creating a universe.”
Horrocks interprets:
Now, most discussion about comics (or fiction, for that matter) assumes that their main purpose is to tell a story – a narrative that moves through time; hence McCloud’s description of comics as a “temporal map.” But here, Kochalka seems to suggest something quite different: that comics create a world, a place. Instead of SPACE = TIME, this is SPACE = SPACE.
Even those narratives that would seem to be primarily interested with mapping time, with telling stories, or plots, can be seen in spatial terms. Horrocks’ character Emil Kopen explains to the character Dylan Horrocks that along with maps of geography, he feels that “stories, too, are basically concerned with spatial relationships. The proximity of bodies. Time is simply what interferes with that, yes?”
In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes that while plot has often been seen as a type of “power war” or “back and forth” that seems to be going on between characters, “narrative is also driven by a pattern of connection and disconnection between characters that is the main source of its emotional effect.” Connection and disconnection are spatial terms; they imply different degrees of proximity.
Horrocks observes that the notion of “world-building” has mostly been popular within the genre of fantasy (i.e. J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts, or Tolkien’s Middle Earth). But Horrocks suggests that “all writers are engaged in ‘sub-creation,’ to the extent that all fiction takes place in a ‘Secondary World,’ no matter how closely it may resemble the ‘real world’ in which we live.” No matter what genre you write in, you can use the same world-building techniques used by fantasy artists and writers.
When we read comics and fiction or watch movies, we are asking the artist to take us into a universe of his making. In the words of Kochalka, “When we encounter a great work of art the physical world fades away as we step into this new reality. We are alive in a living world.” This sounds remarkably similar to John Gardner’s idea of fiction as “a kind of dream” that the reader falls into: “We read a few words at the beginning of the book or the particular story, and suddenly we find ourselves seeing not words on a page but a train moving through Russia, an old Italian crying, or a farmhouse battered by rain. We read on—dream on—not passively but actively.”
If writers and cartoonists accept the idea that what they must first do to create a convincing narrative is world-build, the next step is to wonder how they might go about such a thing.
Alan Moore, in the chapter entitled “Worldbuilding; Place and Personality” in Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics, suggests that world-building simply means coming up with the working details of your world and environment before you actually go about writing your story. He suggests coming up with
a mass of information about the world and the people in it, much of which will never be revealed within the strip for the simple reason that it isn’t stuff that’s essential for the readers to know and there probably won’t be space to fit it all in. What is important is that the writer should have a clear picture of the imagined world in all its detail inside his or her head at all times.
Moore suggests that gifted writers will avoid dropping huge amounts of detail on the reader at one time, but instead use these details sparsely in each frame, to suggest that there is a world going on outside of the frames of the comic. This idea parallels Scott McCloud’s theory of closure—“the comics creator asks us to join in a silent dance of the seen and the unseen. The visible and the invisible.” The comics reader is required to fill in the details of the world going on outside the comic panel, and this will succeed only if the world is concretely realized by the creator.
My argument is that the artist can see written fiction, comics, and film as multiple disciplines on the spectrum of storytelling. Although they all have different ideas about what a story is and how you build and present a story, if we accept that what each discipline does is world-build, then we can use the term “world-building” to move fluidly between disciplines. When we have the world-building tools and processes mastered from multiple disciplines of storytelling—whether it be drawing in the case of comics, or writing in the case of fiction—we can use these tools and processes across disciplines to generate the worlds that we imagine.
Recommended reading:
Several months ago, I was at a talk by comics artist Jessica Abel, and somebody asked her for her number one productivity tip. She said, “get yourself a calendar. Here’s what she has to say (emphasis mine):
“Get yourself a calendar, and schedule the work you have to do in there. Make sure the calendar is the type where you can see a day or a week at at time (not a month at a time), so there’s room to write under each day. Then, mark in any regular commitments you have…Once you’ve got all that there, you will be able to see how much time you really have to work….In the time you have for work, assign yourself very specific tasks…Taking a little time to get all this in your book will do several things for you. It will become clear to you how much you can reasonably get done in a week. It will become clear where you might need to shorten your daily activities to fit in more drawing. And, most importantly, it will give you concrete goals, so that when you finish what you set out to do, you can cross it off and feel good about yourself, and you can also stop working, sometimes the hardest thing to do for a freelance artist. Knowing when you’re on and what you need to get done makes your free time, once you’ve accomplished these goals, truly free, guilt-free. And that’s the most important part of learning to make a life as a working artist.”
When I started the book at the end of June, I knew I had six months to get the manuscript finished. 25 weeks to make 150 brand-new poems. That’s 6 poems a week, one poem a day…if I took a sabbath. But there was no way each poem was going to be worthy of being collected in the book. So I decided to shoot for a 3/5 success rate (which is still way too optimistic), and make 250 poems in 25 weeks. 10 poems a week. Out of the 250, I’d throw out 100, and still have 150 for the book.
250 poems!
I couldn’t see it happening, so I drew it. 25 rows, 10 checkboxes. If I was doing everything right, by Christmas all the checkboxes would be full.
And that’s how I’ve been living for the past four months. Every week, there are 10 checkboxes to be filled, and I fill them. At the end of every poem, there’s the satisfying X.
Creating any long work of art is all about time management. Any goal you want to accomplish: get yourself a calendar. Break the task down into little bits of time. Make it a game.
Fantastic book based on the 1972 BBC miniseries, which someone has uploaded to Youtube, and I’ve assembled into one handy playlist for your viewing pleasure. Amazing how much the contents remain valid in the age of the internet.
The first essay is about art in the age of photography and reproduction, and is based on Walter Benjamin‘s essay, “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin’s idea was that in an era where an image can be easily reproduced, art might be “freed up” and become available to a mass audience.
I’ve recently been going back and forth with an artist friend of mine about his fine-arts-based world (where his collectors value the original, one-of-a-kind) and mine (where there is no original, only reproductions, on the blog, in the book, etc). Our ideas about making art are very similar, but our business models couldn’t be more different!
I was with him and our wives at an opening in an art gallery in town last night and couldn’t get over how uncomfortable I felt about the whole thing. There was free beer, sure, but no artist’s statement, no postcards, nothing. There was only a photocopy of the price list, along with some goofy map of the exhibit that related “culture vs. nature” or something cliched along those lines…
Why so uncomfortable?
First, the idea that anyone has $10,000 to spend on a piece of art boggles my mind. Second, I find it alienating, as someone without the $10,000 to spend on art, to not be able to “own” or “buy into” or “take home” some part of the work. Regardless of how much you love the art, there’s nothing he can sell to you, there’s nothing you can buy into, no way for you to show your support or love for the work. All you can do is snap a bootleg shot on your camera phone. You feel like a f*&%ing second-class citizen: You can look, but don’t touch. It’s worse than a museum: at least in a museum you can buy a postcard or a book in the gift shop.
Contrast this with my experience at Maker Faire earlier in the day, where the idea was: come make things with us. Everyone is encouraged to join in.
Take our friends Bleep Labs. They had:
Art in the age of mechanical reproduction, indeed! Every level of merchandising was covered.
More thoughts on this to come.
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