Austin Kleon

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I HAVE NOT TRIED THIS MYSELF, IT SEEMS DANGEROUS

From “On Whaling,” by Anders Nilsen, from MOME, Winter 2006

Nilsen goes on to outline his automatic writing exercise:

First, you need a clock. Then: get a notebook or about 40 to 60 pages of paper. Draw one of three things, an animal, a robot, or your mom’s boyfriend. Make it very simple. Stick figures are fine. Okay, now you have 60 seconds to think of something for it to say or do. When sixty seconds is up you have to turn the page and start on the next one. The next one is the next panel, and you only have 60 seconds to draw it, so think fast. If you can’t think of something for one panel, that’s okay. It’s just a pause in the action. You change every 60 seconds for an hour. When you are done you will be surprised.”

RENDEZVOUS

Here’s a weird comic I did in response to the McSweeney’s contest inspired by Dan Wiencek‘s “13 Writing Prompts.”

4.

Write a story that ends with the following sentence: Debra brushed the sand from her blouse, took a last, wistful look at the now putrefying horse, and stepped into the hot-air balloon.

rendezvous.gif

Happily Ever After.

And in case you didn’t hear, ukuleles are all the rage.

“When you show up at a party with a guitar, it’s serious. People expect something!”

CONCENTRATE!

concentrate.gif

This is the first in what I hope to be several exercises hatched under the influence of Lynda Barry. See, Lynda keeps a stack of index cards with different words on them, and every morning she gets up very early, gets her ink ready, dips her brush, and pulls out a word, and whatever that word is, she uses the image it conjures to start up a piece of writing. Whenever she can’t think of how to start out, she uses the words, “It was a time when…” and goes from there. And because she’s using the top of her brain to make the letters look neat with the brush, the bottom of her brain can work on the good stuff. Oh, and she can’t erase what she’s written. She wrote all of CRUDDY this way.

To try it out, I opened the dictionary, and the first word I looked at was “juice.” I started out with a big rectangular block of black, and started erasing…

…death to Microsoft Word!

OU! BA! PO!

OuBaPo.gifOuBaPo (The Workshop for Potential Comics) is an offshoot of OuLiPo. From the site:

Comics is a medium founded on constraints. Our very sense of what a comic is-whether a newspaper strip, Sunday page, comic book or web comic-is to a large extent determined by formal characteristics or constraints. The project of the French group Oubapo (Workshop for Potential Comics) is to identify those constraints that already exist…and to propose and implement new constraints that can generate new comics….Oubapo is not a movement that you join or follow. Oubapo is an approach to thinking about and creating comics using constraints as a creative principle.

Sean says the group isn’t quite as active as it used to be, but the site is a nice archive of projects. Here and here are two works that he submitted.

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