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

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.—Louis Menand, “Show or Tell: Should creative writing be taught?“

For me, the question isn’t should, it’s how.

How should creative writing be taught?

In The 3 A.M Epiphany, Brian Kitely writes that his approach 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.

I don’t really like doing exercises, I like playing games. My own philosophy is: “if writing isn’t a joy for the writer to write, it won’t be a joy for the reader to read.” So, I’ve spent the majority of my recent writing life trying to turn writing into a game—to push it explicitly towards play. (Like, ahem, using newspapers and markers to make poems…)

[Note: for more on writing as a game, read up on OuLiPo.]

No one has influenced my thinking about this more than the writer and cartoonist Lynda Barry, who I met in 2006. She has dedicated her to most-recent work to the question, “Where do stories come from?”, first in her book, One! Hundred! Demons!, where she used a japanese sumi-e brush to draw her “demons,” and second in her amazing collage-art/comix-memoir/writing textbook, What It is.

a page from What It Is

From an interview with the Comics Reporter:

What It Is is based on something I learned from my teacher, Marilyn Frasca, at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. I studied with her for two years in the late 1970s. Her idea seemed to be that everything we call art, whether it’s music or dance or writing or painting, anything we call art is a container for something she called an image. And she believed that once you understood what an image is, then the form you give it is up to you.

The question “What is an Image?” has guided all of my work for over 30 years. Because of what I learned from Marilyn, there isn’t much of a difference in the experience of painting a picture, writing a novel, making a comic strip, reading a poem or listening to a song. The containers are different, but the lively thing in the center is what I’m interested in.

Can you teach creativity? Maybe not, but you can teach people what the energy flow of creating something feels like (hint: it’s no different from how you felt smashing GI Joes together in the driveway), and once you’ve felt that energy, you can set up processes to help you tap into that energy.

Once you know how to drink from that tap, then it’s only a matter of spending a bunch of time with a paintbrush, or a guitar, or an arc welder.

And to get back to the Kitely quote, “don’t worry much about success or failure.” This is a really important point. There’s a place for creating for writing for the sheer joy of writing, and there’s a place for figuring out whether it’s any good or not. In Lynda’s workshop, there is nothing but encouragement. No place for criticism.

My own stance is that art isn’t made by committee. If you want to know whether your stuff is any good, get a big bunch of readers (not just teachers [people paid to read your writing] or students [people paying to read your writing]), and see what happens. The way I did this was by starting a blog—by putting my stuff up for free on the internet.

The key ingredient in all this is time. You need time to get good, and you need time to build a readership.

So if it’s going to take time, how do you feed and clothe yourself after college?

The answer: get a day job and keep it.

I just finished Hugh MacLeod‘s great new book, Ignore Everybody. Hugh has said the book is “advice I wish I had when I was in my early 20s that I learned the hard way after many years. I had just finished college and I had a creative bug, but I had no way to make a living doing it.” It sprung from his piece “How To Be Creative,” which was a big deal to me when I found it a year or so ago, specifically for his “Sex and Cash Theory.”

The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.

Once you let go of the idea of making your money primarily by being an artist, you’re set free. You can make what you want. Get a day job, work 9-5, and squirrel a few hours each day away for your writing, drawing, whatever. Start a blog, so you have an outlet. Once your art is making more money than your day job, you can quit (I sure as heck still work my 9-5…)

My big question, which I’ve asked of many writers, and many have been unable to answer, is: how can you be a decent family man and also be an artist?

Many of our favorite writers/artists weren’t so great as human beings. They couldn’t keep their marriages together, they neglected their kids, they lost their friends—all in sacrifice to their art.

The world needs more great human beings. It doesn’t necessarily need more artists.

I haven’t found many great books on balancing art and family. I have a sneaking suspicion that any such books have been written by women. (Maybe you can suggest a couple?)

The one book I have read that’s helped me out is Bruce Holland Rogers’ Word Work. There are three great chapters on relationships in that book: “Writers and Lovers,” “Writers Loving Writers,” and “Writers Loving Non-Writers.”

So anyways, when it comes to ways to teach writing and teaching folks how to be writers, you could do a lot worse than to buy these books:

• Lynda Barry, What It is
• Hugh Macleod, Ignore Everybody
• Bruce Holland Rogers, Word Work
• Brian Kitely, The 3 A.M Epiphany

Let me know what you think and please list your favorite writing/creativity books in the comments!

Are you or do you know of a teacher or student who has used Newspaper Blackout Poems in the classroom? Are you a writer using them in your writing group or creative writing workshop?

If so, please share your experience in the comments or e-mail me. I’m looking for lesson plans, results, testimonials, photos, videos, or even a few simple sentences about how you went about teaching them, what the response was, etc.

Thanks in advance!

UPDATE: Check out the comments for examples!

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.”

My friend Brandon (who keeps refusing to answer my e-mails now that he’s a fancypants graduate student — maybe he’ll read this and feel guilty) once told me that in the lazy afternoons, he’d been watching soap operas with sound off, writing his own dialogue for the characters on the screen. I thought that sounded like a fun writing exercise, but wasn’t sure what the equivalent would be for drawing.*

Then, a few weeks ago I came across a crappy-looking movie that was shot in the same whaling town one of my characters lived in. So I picked up the DVD, sat down with my sketchbook in front of the TV. But instead of watching it, I used the fast forward and pause buttons to freeze-frame scenes that I thought were pretty decent. Then I super-imposed my own characters over those scenes.

By the time I’d made it through the movie, I had several pages worth of comics panels (without dialogue — but you could certainly add dialogue), and it occured to me, you could do a whole comic like this, if you really wanted to.

* Though, come to think of it, Kenneth Koch used to give his poetry students comic books that they’d never read, and order them to white-out the speech balloons without reading the dialogue, and write their own….

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

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