I’m good at keeping my posts on the tumblelog tagged, and the other day I was clicking around and thought, “Hey, you could make a pretty decent bio out of those tags…”

My name is Austin Kleon and I am a writer and a cartoonist and a web designer. I make these things called newspaper blackout poems, which some call poetry.

I grew up in a small town in southern Ohio, and still have family there. I think you are where you were, and so place, worldbuilding and maps are obsessions of mine.

Writing, storytelling, songwriting, cartooning, and drawing are all ways that I play so I can feel alive and happy.

I’m fascinated by how we see and process the world around us, which involves vision, memory, and neuroscience.

I believe that visual thinking is one of the best tools we humans have to solve problems and that we should, like the cavemen, practice drawing on the walls. Sometimes a picture is better than words, and so we have Isotype and wordless stories. Most of the time a picture is better with words, and so we have comics, information design and infographics.

I love pure black and white, but I’m trying to learn color.

For artists, I think that sometimes you don’t have to go to college, you should keep your day job, and write the book you want to read. I also wonder, what if we give it away?

Like most people, I like music and movies. Sometimes I talk politics and religion.

These are just a few of the folks who blow my mind: Lynda Barry, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Schulz, Edward Tufte, Anders Nilsen, Kevin Huizenga, Tom Gauld, Saul Steinberg, Otto Soglow, Bill Callahan, and Joann Sfar.

I believe life is a story and often that story is just a collage or remix of who/what came before us.

I’m married to a wonderful woman and I live in Austin, Texas.

Forgive me if this is really f***ing cheesy.

Another one cut from the book.

The cartoonist Tom Hart (Hutch Owen) has a fantastic blog called “Cartooning Like You Mean It,” and he’s been posting recently about mark-making, poetry, and drama. Here’s a clip from his post, “Drama vs. Poetry“:

Drama is the manipulation of characters and events in opposition with each other. In its most extreme, it is superficial and distancing: tired action movies about good guys and bad guys. In it’s best examples, characters are deeply drawn and communicate, questioning and exploring the themes of the drama both in their behaviors and thoughts.

Poetry I would argue is the single image designed to provoke or evoke other impressions and ideas in the mind and inner eye of the audience. Poetic image is created using the images of our society: people, places, and time etc. At its most extreme and superficial, it is cloying, simplistic, Hallmark cards and childish posters. At its most astute, it uses hints of drama to offer up enough action, enough motion and opposition between the characters and other elements to suggest worlds within the audience and to allow meditative space within them.

(Emphasis mine.)

I’ve often thought of my poems as little scenes from stories told in images made out of words. In fact, when I started making them, almost four years ago, they began as writing exercises to generate ideas for short stories. (Short stories are what they teach you to write in college, and so I tried to write them.)

In the book, Meg and I tried to string the poems together in an order that suggested a rise and fall, a sense of time and place, of movement…of some kind of narrative.

We’ll find out in another year whether we succeeded. The new sale date is February 9, 2010. A year from two days ago.

Who even knows where we’ll all be by then?

(Thanks to Derik Badman for pointing out the Hart quote.)

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!

* * *

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:

• Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville
• Derik Badman’s review of Hicksville (there’s a paragraph about the “maps” section)
• Dylan Horrocks, “Comics, Games and World-Building”
• James Kochalka, The Cute Manifesto
• Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics

Adapted from John Medina‘s cool book, Brain Rules:

1. EXERCISE boosts brain power.

Moving around gets more blood and oxygen pumping to the brain, which gives you more ideas. (See Haruki Murakami’s essay on writing and running in the New Yorker.)

4. We don’t pay ATTENTION to boring things.

Elmore Leonard says, “Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.” Kurt Vonnegut called it “being a good date.”

7. SLEEP well, think well.

Get plenty of shut eye, and figure out when you’re most creative: it’s probably either early in the morning or late at night. NO ONE is creative during the mid-afternoon, and that’s why some of the greatest thinkers of all time were notorious for 3PM naps. (Salvador Dali napped with a spoon.) Hit a snag? Sleep on it: our brain is constantly working things out in our sleep. Keep a dream journal.

9. Stimulate more of THE SENSES.

Pictures and words belong together. Write by hand with a pen or paintbrush. Cut words out of magazines. Use a Sharpie and a newspaper….

10. VISION trumps all the other senses.

Words are seen, and stories are images.

12. We are powerful and natural EXPLORERS.

Even at an old age, our brain is still malleable. We can still learn new things and improve. It ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Links:

• Brain rules for PowerPoint & Keynote presenters
• Visit the Brain Rules Website
• Buy the book on Amazon

Everything from your haircut to your clothes to the type of instrument you play to the melody of a song to the rhythm — they’re all tricks to get people to pay attention to the story,” he said.

“If you just stood up in a crowd and said your story — ‘I came home, and this girl I was dating wasn’t there, and I was wondering where she was’ — it’s not interesting,” he said. “But give it a melody, give it a beat, build it all the way up to a haircut. Now people pay attention.”

- Jack White

On inspiration:

[M]yths, fairy-tales and religious stories like the Bible…They are endlessly interpretable and adaptable. A bottomless source. They’re the template for pretty much all storytelling in the Western world. Whether by design or by stumbling onto them I think there is much to be gained from brushing up against them, borrowing, stealing, rewriting and quoting from them, whether subtly…or overtly…”

On not-knowing:

…when making comics is working, it really doesn’t feel like you are the one telling the story, it feels like the story already exists and you are just doing your best to get it down on paper. It’s like a very carefully attentive manufacturing process. So for the story to change would be like for someone who assembles calculators to start changing the calculators. They probably wouldn’t work.”

On art and religion:

All art comes from religion. From trying to understand and contend with the world.”

On the artist disguising himself in his work:

I’m happy to be back to my usual practice of heavily disguising my life in the stories I tell. Generally speaking, it’s still me in my other work, it’s just that I’m disguised as a bunch of little birds.”

Anders Nilsen – The Metabunker Interview pt. 4 of 4

Here’s the rub about comics and storytelling:

Say you start with this panel. What comes next?

I’ve got it in my head that I want the next panel to be a husband watching his wife mow the lawn.

What if he’s sitting on the porch drinking a beer?

What if he’s getting out of his BMW in a suit and tie?

What if he’s sitting in a wheelchair?

Line by line, panel by panel, everything hinges on these tiny decisions.

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!

From a great New Yorker article about Philip Pullman:

Near the end of “The Golden Compass,” Lord Asriel asks Lyra to bring him a copy of the Bible, and he reads her a passage from Genesis….“But it en’t true, is it?” Lyra asks of the story. “Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn’t really an Adam and Eve” Lord Asriel tells her to think of the story as an “imaginary number, like the square root of minus one.” Its truth might not be tangible, but you can use it to calculate “all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.” The metaphor is not just cunning; it helps explain why Pullman, a champion of science, writes in the fantastic mode.

Pullman ALSO did the illustrations for the Dark Materials trilogy. He talks about the process here, and you can view the illustrations here and here.

Kurt Vonnegut’s master’s thesis in anthropology was rejected by the University of Chicago. “It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut writes. “One must not be too playful.” This excerpt from PALM SUNDAY, is the gist of his argument:

Anyone can graph a simple story if he or she will crucify it, so to speak, on the intersecting axes I here depict:

“G” stands for good fortune. “I” stands for ill fortune. “B” stands for the beginning of a story. “E” stands for its end.

A much beloved story in our society is about a person who is leading a bearable life, who experiences misfortune, who overcomes misfortune, and who is happier afterward for having demonstrated resourcefulness and strength. As a graph, that story looks like this:

Another story of which Americans never seem to tire is about a person who becomes happier upon finding something he or she likes a lot. The person loses whatever it is, and then gets it back forever. As a graph, it looks like this:

An American Indian creation myth, in which a god of some sort gives the people the sun and then the moon and then the bow and arrow and then the corn and so on, is essentially a staircase, a tale of accumulation:

Almost all creation myths are staircases like that. Our own creation myth, taken from the Old Testament, is unique, so far as I could discover, in looking like this:

The sudden drop in fortune, of course, is the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” in which an already hopelessly unhappy man turns into a cockroach, looks like this:

Have a look [at "Cinderella"]:

The steps you see, are all the presents the fairy godmother gave to Cinderella….The sudden drop is the stroke of midnight at the ball….But then the prince finds her and marries her, and she is infinitely happy ever after. She gets all the stuff back, and then some. A lot of people think the story is trash, and, on graph paper, it certainly looks like trash.

But then I said to myself, Wait a minute–those steps at the beginning look like the creation myth of virtually every society on earth. And then I saw that the stroke of midnight looked exactly like the unique creation myth in the Old Testament. And then I saw that the rise to bliss at the end was identical with the expectation of redemption as expressed in primitive Christianity.

The tales were identical.

UPDATE: Vonnegut goes over this again in A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY, which I’m currently listening to on audiotape (so no diagrams…but never fear: Gerry over at Backwards City has posted the chalkboard graph of “The Metamorphosis.”)