At last week’s VizThink Austin (@VizThinkAustin on Twitter) my friend Sunni Brown asked me to give a variation of my Visual Thinking for Writers talk. Little did I know that Chris Haro of Mighty Pretty Media was going to be there taping, and he was kind enough to allow me to post it all online. I can’t imagine how much time it took him to edit 40 minutes worth of video, so thank you, Chris!

In the first three videos, I talk way too much about my writing background, then get on to good stuff, like how to use index cards to brainstorm ideas, using graphs to understand story structure, and the power of adding captions to pictures.

Thanks to Sunni, Chris, and the amazing group of folks who came out to listen to me chatter on! Here are some iPhone pics I took of them in action:

Y’all rock. I hope that those of you in the Austin area will come to the next Vizthink.

You can watch the videos below or in this Youtube playlist.

On my writing background

On discovering comics, visual thinking, and information design

From writer’s block to Newspaper Blackout

Linear vs. non-linear process

On index cards

On story structure and Kurt Vonnegut’s story charts

The power of captions, and putting pictures and words together

In November I taught my second online course for Vizthink, “Visual Thinking for Writers.”

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It was a catalogue of techniques I’ve discovered over the past couple of years that have helped me with my own writing.

I thought up the course after thinking a lot about the tools writers use, and how young writers are often scoffed at in Q&A sessions when they ask things like “Do you write by hand or on a computer?”

In my experience, it’s not a silly question at all: tools -> process -> writing.

The way you work is important.

My main idea was that the best thing you can do for your writing is step away from the computer, spend $10 in the school supply aisle of your local grocery store, and start making writing with your hands. (See this Wall Street Journal article that asked novelists how they write — well over half of them start with handwritten notes, index cards, etc.) If I was going to teach the workshop in the flesh, I would simply organize it by pens, index cards, post-it notes, scissors, tape, etc.

Here’s a reading list of blog posts I used as inspiration:

• Lay It All Out Where You Can Look At It
• Get Yourself A Calendar
• Mind Maps: Pictures and Words In Space
• Comics Without Pictures
• Writing The Fibonacci Sonnet
• Tools
• How-To Books
• Graph a Story with Mr. Vonnegut
• Maps of Fictional Worlds
• Writing on the Walls

I’ve posted some of my slides below.

UPDATE: Here’s some really nice praise from one of the webinar participants:

Austin Kleon’s webinar was engaging, energetic, and expert. My colleague and I went into the webinar thinking we were getting a $60 presentation. What we got was a learning experience that was intelligent, interesting, fresh, funny — yet grounded in solid research about the ways people think about and respond to their worlds. And it’s *immediately applicable* to both our professional and personal lives! If this is what VizThinkU provides, we’ll be back — a lot.- Denise Dilworth, Content Strategist

Last week Meg and I drove out to San Angelo, Texas. My friend Laurence Musgrove had invited me out to Angelo State to give a talk to a poetry class and conduct a blackout poetry workshop. The idea was to have a kind of “warm up” presentation to get ideas for any book tour I might do. This is the first time I had done anything like this, and how it went far exceeded my expectations. The students were great: they were engaged, eager, and they asked awesome questions. (Laurence posted a great Flickr set of the workshop – the photos in this post are his.)

Below I’ve posted the complete slideshow:

Here I am hating on Microsoft Word:

Here’s how the workshop went:

• I taped newspaper broadsheets to the walls and gave everyone a marker
• We formed a line, and I started by circling one anchor word or phrase
• The next person in line was instructed to build off that anchor phrase
• We kept going until poems emerged

The challenge, as always, was to get the students circling concrete nouns and verbs — words that put images in the head.

This combo made us all chuckle:

We only had a half hour or so, so we didn’t get any finished poems, but I promised everybody I’d go home and see what I could get out of the work we started. I’ll post the results here when I get a chance.

Thanks to Laurence, Angelo State, and all the great students!

I’m hoping we can do more of these workshops after the book comes out.

MODERN ART = I COULD DO THAT + YEAH, BUT YOU DIDN’T—“Modern Art” from More New Math by Craig Damrauer

It’s said in different sentences.

“An idea so simple I can’t believe nobody thought of it before.”

“I could’ve done that.”

“Any idiot could do that.”

“I’m sure you’re not the first person to put Sharpie to newspaper.”

(That last one came from a trollish e-mail I got last week.)

If you have a good idea and it’s well-executed, it looks effortless. It looks like it’s been around forever.

But I don’t want it to look effortless! you say. I want it to look as hard as I worked on it.

No, you don’t. You want it to look easy.

Bob Gill says it best, in Graphic Design As A Second Language:

There’s nothing more embarrassing than a juggler who always looks as if he’s about to drop whatever he’s juggling.

By my standards, however difficult it is to make art, it should always look easy, never labored. That’s what I mean by inevitable.

After the curtain came down on a Paddy Chayefsky play, the person sitting next to me got up and complained to his wife, “what’s the big deal? I cudda written that.”

I assumed that what he meant, was that he was not aware of anything the playwright actually did. It was as if the playwright simply pressed the on button of a tape recorder, so that the characters in the play were so convincing, was its strength.

This is what I try for. I like the idea that if I’m successful, the guy who sat next to me that night, would have the same reaction to my work, as he did with Chayefsky’s.

But perhaps the reason ideas seem “inevitable” is because they are:

Every idea is a juxtaposition. That’s it. A juxtaposition of existing concepts. —Steven Grant

The idea maker is a collage artist. You put two ideas together, and you get a third new one.

The trick, as Grant writes, is to fill your head with many ideas (reading is the best way to do this), and keep the ones that appeal to you.

Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.—Jim Jarmusch

The next step is to put them up against each other—to find patterns. The third and final step is to do create your collage, to fuse the ideas so seemlessly that it seems effortless.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.— T.S. Eliot, 1920, The Sacred Wood

Of course, sometimes you don’t need a good idea. Sometimes the only thing you have to do is give an existing idea a good name (“an idea is gold / only if you name it“):

It was an idea that was already out there, but I shined a spotlight on it, named it, and everybody got it right away.— Sam Martin

It’s all very much like making a blackout poem, actually: you sift through words, pick the ones you like, find the pattern of words that work good together, and blackout the rest into one coherent piece.

If you did it well, it looks easy.

This one is dedicated to Tom Hart, whose “How To Say Everything” I am currently devouring.

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