tried out on my writing group last night. hard as hell. [PDF] if you want it.

OuBaPo (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.

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!

Rules the writers and artists followed in making the Coyote-Road Runner series:

1. The Road Runner cannot harm the coyote except by going “Beep-beep!”

2. No outside force can harm the coyote—only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products.

3. The coyote can stop any time—if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.”–George Santayana)

4. There may be no dialogue ever, except “beep-beep!” The coyote may, however, speak to the audience through wooden signs that he holds up.

5. The Road Runner must stay on the road —otherwise, logically, he would not be called “Road Runner”.

6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters—the southwest American desert.

7. All materials, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.

8. Whenever possible, gravity should be made the coyote’s greatest enemy.

9. The coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.

(from Chuck Amuck, the biography of animator Chuck Jones)