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.

Over 100 people signed up for Tuesday’s Vizthink “Visual Note-taking 101″ webinar put on by me, Sunni Brown, Mike Rohde, and moderated by Dave Gray (with great support from Ryan Coleman and Chris Pascucci…thanks, guys!)

It was a rad way to spend 3 hours: I taught the first section called “But I Can’t Draw!” that tried to get people thinking about drawing as building or collage using a simple alphabet (line, point, circle, square, triangle). We learned to draw stick figures and faces…oh, it was good fun. AND I found out that I really, really love teaching: what could be better than sharing your passion with eager students?

Here are a couple of screengrabs from my session:

UPDATE: Here’s a short version of my “How To Draw Faces” activity:

I drew live in Sketchbook Pro during Mike and Sunni’s presentation, and here are the results:

Mike Rohde’s Sketchnoting presentation

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Map of Sunni Brown’s, “The Art of Listening” presentation

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Here are two thrilling shots of me in action:

And here’s my webinar setup:

Mike has a good recap that pretty much covers everything that went down, including notes from my section and notes from the awesome participants, and Sunni has posted her tips on listening for graphic recording and visual note-taking.

I also highly recommend checking out the notes tagged viznotes on Flickr and all the great Twitter chatter about the event.

(And for fun, go see Rob Court‘s cartoon of my dog Milo, who started whimpering about 2/3 of the way through.)

You can see two little slideshow excerpts from my presentation: “The Battle Between Pictures and Words” and “Anatomy of a Mind Map”

And be sure to check out VizThink!

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On May 12th, I’ll be doing a Vizthink webinar with my friends Sunni Brown, Mike Rohde, and Dave Gray (as moderator) on visual note-taking. Price is $99, but you get access to the live session AND the recording AND it all goes to the good cause of keeping the Vizthink staff and community afloat financially.

Visual note-taking 101: Techniques for making your notes more visual and memorable
with Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown and Austin Kleon

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 | 11:00am EDT (15:00 GMT) | 3 Hours

Ever since Leonardo put pen to paper, visual note-taking has been a route to improve the quality of your thinking, make information more memorable, and make your ideas easier to share with others. Learn practical techniques and “tricks of the trade” from modern visual note-taking masters Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown and Austin Kleon. In this three-hour course you will learn how to use visual note-taking to improve your listening skills and take better, more memorable notes. The focus of this class will be on how to write, sketch, and diagram ideas live, in real time, as you hear them. Many of the techniques you will learn will also help to improve your skills in drawing your ideas at the flip chart or whiteboard.

Get more information and register here. (Also: dig the new VizthinkU portion of the Vizthink website!)

Sunni does graphic facilitation for a living, so she’s used to talking about her and her work, but this will be the first time that Mike or I have dug in and tried to explain what it is that we do.

The seminar will be in three parts. Sunni will talk about the art of listening and Mike will talk about being an editor vs. a stenographer. My part is called, “But I can’t draw!” I’ll be addressing folks’ fears of the pen, and talking about how there’s a a drawing alphabet just as there is a writing alphabet, and if you just learn the alphabet, you can draw anything. I’ll be using some cartoon theory, Lynda Barry’s “Two Questions”, Ed Emberley’s “Make A World”, and ripping off Dave Gray’s stuff on how to draw.

(TIP: I’ll be collecting a lot of my materials for the talk under the tumblr tag “But I Can’t Draw!” if you want a sneak-preview.)

This should be a lot of fun. I’m thrilled to be associated with these folks, and a little overwhelmed at the prospect of teaching with them: after all, it’s been only three years since I learned that this stuff even had a name…

Please let me know in the comments if you have any specific questions you’d like to have answered or topics you’d like addressed!

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UPDATE: Here’s a sneak-preview of the introduction/bio slideshow I’m making for my portion:

UPDATE: A recap of the event.