Get this writing exercise in a printable, mini-comic format: [PDF].

Matt Madden was kind enough to clue me in to the existence of Jochen Gerner’s TNT En Amerique — a blackout comic that takes Herge’s Tintin In America and reduces the speech bubbles to phrases and the colors to graphic symbols. The project came about through Gerner’s experience with OuBaPo — the comics equivalent of the group exploring writing with constraints, OuLiPo.

Here’s a look at one of the pages:

Gerner says of his work (obviously a translation from French):

The main interest for me of the comic strip is the infinite possible links between text and image: a system of representation continually confronting, in a kind of alchemy, text and picture….The idea “TNT en Amérique” sprang from…OuBaPo, from exercises, experiments. I try to find new reading perspectives. I dismantle a given material to make something else of it…. I bought…old copies of “Tintin en Amérique”. [I] worked directly on the printed editions by cutting the pages one by one and covering them thickly with black ink….I did not see this book as a “technical feat” but as the discovery of a secret passage , of a dark track followed to the end.

I can’t get a close enough look at the pages to really tell exactly what’s going on, but it’s got something to do with violence and America: Gerner goes on about how the page became “night” with unblackened color emerging like neon signs from American life. Here’s a few page spreads from the publisher’s site:

James Kochalka has said of this kind of thing, “remixes destroy the original comic art, but create something new and wonderful from it. Like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, destruction equals creation.” I dig it.

I’d write more about OuBaPo and OuLiPo, but we’re trying to pack up for our big Austin apartment-hunting trip. For more on my thoughts about writing and restraints, see these past posts: “Mathematical Storytelling,” “A Humument,” and my “Newspaper Blackout Poems.”

Big thanks to Matt for the tip! Be sure to check out his really cool book, 99 Ways To Tell A Story: Exercise In Style, and his blog.

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.”

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.

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!”

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!