Tonight I’ll be giving a slideshow about Newspaper Blackout as part of Austin Pecha Kucha night #7. Sneak preview of my slides, above.

What is Pecha Kucha?

PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat”, it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It’s a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

At the last Austin event, they had hundreds and hundreds of people, and I heard they even had to turn some folks away, but tonight It’s gonna be in a big empty retail space at 416 W. Cesar Chavez, so everyone should be able to get in. The doors open at 7:30pm, presentations start at 8:20 pm. There’s beer. No cover, only donations.

Come by, listen to some cool folks talk about their work, and pick up a postcard!

More info here.

I think of almost everything in terms of collage.

My poems are made up of bits and pieces of words I’ve taken from newspaper articles.

My drawings are simply collages of points, lines, triangles, circles, and squares. I take Saul Steinberg’s faces, Otto Soglow’s hands, John Porcellino’s lines, Lynda Barry’s handwriting…

I myself am simply a collage of my ancestor’s DNA, mixed with the hundreds of thousands of words and images and ideas that my brain has absorbed.

Etc.

These are all quotes and doodles I abandoned while working on a presentation for next week’s PechaKucha night here in Austin.

Most of these notes were grabbed from my tumblr tags on “collage“, “influence“, and “originality” or “plagiarism.” I grabbed one or two from Jonathan Lethem’s incredibly essay, “The Ecstacy of Influence.”

Next time you’re stuck, think of your work as a collage. Steal two or more ideas from your favorite artists and start juxtaposing them. Voila.

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.”
—Jim Jarmusch

“If you think a man draws the type of hands that you want to draw, steal ‘em. Take those hands.”
—Jack Kirby

“You can’t steal a gift. Bird [Charlie Parker] gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.”
—Dizzy Gillespie

A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”
— T.S. Eliot

“In the grand collage that is Dada, past and future are equally usable.”
— Andrei Codrescu

“Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.”
—Carl Jung

“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”
—Lewis Hyde

“The choices a writer makes within a tradition – preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme – constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.”
—Zadie Smith

“If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.
— R G Collingwood

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

“I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.”
— Brian Eno

“Really the truth is just a plain picture. A plain picture of, let’s say, a tramp vomiting in the sewere. You know, and next door to the picture Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. C. W. Jones on the subway going to work. You know, any kind of picture. Just make a collage of pictures.”
—Bob Dylan

“Sometimes I think everything I draw is just a combination of all of the millions and millions of drawings I’ve seen.”
—Dash Shaw

“If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.”
— Wilson Mizner

“If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original!”
— Gary Panter

My hobbie (one of them anyway)…is using a lot of scotch tape… My hobbie is to pick out different things during what I read and piece them together and make a little story of my own.”
—Louis Armstrong

“The beauty of the collage technique is that you’re using sounds that have never met and were never supposed to meet. You introduce them to each other, at first they’re a bit shy, clumsy, staring at their shoes. But you can sense there’s something there. So you cut and paste a little bit and by the end of the song you can spot them in the corner, holding hands.”
— Jens Lekman

“To spark my creativity…I often re-use pieces from my other works…basically collaging my own stuff…”
—Nate Williams

“All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?”
—William S. Burroughs

“I love art, I love being thrilled by art, and I love folding these thrills into my own practice. I love stealing….I absolutely believe my best work lies ahead of me, and lies in the work I’m absolutely on fire to steal from.”
—Tom Hart

“I was…attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing “simple” music, blamed for deserting “modernism,” accused of renouncing my “true Russian heritage.” People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried “sacrilege”: “The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone.” To them all my answer was and is the same: You “respect,” but I love.”
—Igor Stravinsky

“Some one may say of me, that I have here only made a nosegay of other men’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the thread to tie them.”
— Montaigne

“I’m being given a little bit of credit now as being a viable collage artist, which some people think is ridiculous. Like this guy who said, “Wait a minute: You had an art show where you just cut out pictures and then glued them back together?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s pretty much what it is.” There’s more to it than that. It’s about having the eye for detail, moving things from one environment and reassembling them into new environments….Everyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well.”
—Robert Pollard

“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.”
— T.S. Eliot

“It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
— Jean-Luc Godard

Add your favorites and anything I missed in the comments below.

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 after the jump or in this Youtube playlist.

(more…)

“Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life…”— William Zinsser, “How To Write A Memoir”

We all know keeping a calendar of future events is important.

What about keeping a calendar of past events?

The best writing project I took on last year was what I call my logbook: a simple Moleskine daily planner in which I kept track of the little details of my day. Who, what, where types of details. Who I met, what I did, where I went, etc.

It’s not a diary or a journal. It’s a book of lists. The lists are simple facts.

Why not just keep a diary?

For one thing, I’m lazy. It’s easier to just list the events of the day than to craft them into a prose narrative. Any time I’ve tried to keep a journal, I ran out of steam pretty quick.

But more importantly, keeping a simple list of who/what/where means I write down events that seem mundane at the time, but later on help paint a better portrait of the day, or even become more significant over time. By “sticking to the facts” I don’t pre-judge what was important or what wasn’t, I just write it down.

Best of all, limiting each day to one page and breaking it down into a list instead of prose makes it easier for me to scan through it later, and get a real feel for the passing of time as I flip the pages.

From the Wikipedia entry for “logbook”:

A logbook was originally a book for recording readings from the log, and is used to determine the distance a ship traveled within a certain amount of time. The readings of the log have been recorded in equal times to give the distance traveled with respect to a given start position.

The distance the ship traveled. I like that.

(Below are a couple iPhone snapshots of example pages — these days aren’t significant, they’re just days with events benign enough to share with y’all.)

I’m teaching a visual thinking for writers workshop here in Austin next month. (View a few slides from my previous class.)

Description:

As visual thinkers, we concentrate a lot on pictures, but rarely on words. Join us at the next Vizthink Austin, where we’ll learn visual thinking techniques that can help us become better writers. Using simple school supplies that can be found at any corner drugstore, we’ll step away from the computer and make writing with our hands, using index cards, scissors, and even old comic books. Whether you’re trying to write an office e-mail, a grant application, or even The Great American Novel, this session will help!

LOCATION: Leadership Austin, 1609 Shoal Creek Blvd, Suite 202, Austin, TX 78701 (Map)
DATE: Wednesday, February 3rd
TIME: 6 – 8 pm

More info

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

[ Description  ] [ Buy It ]

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

see it bigger

Here I am modeling my new favorite t-shirt:

Designed by Kyle Fletcher of Mutual Midwest and screen printed by our friends at the one and only Wire&Twine, this 5-color design features every illustration in Ed Emberley’s classic drawing book, “Make a World”. From dump truck to schooner, from forklift to dinosaur, every image is on the shirt.

Go here and buy one to support the production of the upcoming documentary, Ed Emberley’s Make A World: The Film.

I only came to Ed Emberley’s Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make A World last year, but it’s quickly become the #1 book I recommend to people I meet who say, “I can’t draw.” In it, Ed Emberley shows you how to “make a world” with just a few simple shapes, step-by-step. I love the emphasis on simplicity: if you can draw a triangle, a square, a circle, and a line, you’re good to go.

(Here’s a great little video review of the book by Chris Glass.)

And yeah, I have sat down with the book and copied all the exercises!

See more of my posts about Ed Emberley.

I grew up in a small town. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was hang out with artists. All I wanted to do was get the heck out of southern Ohio and get someplace where something was happening.

Now I live in Austin, Texas. A pretty hip place. Tons of artists and creative types everywhere.

And you know what? I’d say that 90% of my mentors and peers don’t live here. They live on the internet. Which is to say, most of my thinking and talking and art-related fellowship is online.

Instead of a geographical art scene, I have Twitter buddies and Google Reader.

Life is weird.

from The New Yorker’s profile of Wes Anderson

New word (for me) via Wikipedia:

Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source’s intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as “quoting out of context”. The problem here is not the removal of a quote from its original context (as all quotes are) per se, but to the quoter’s decision to exclude from the excerpt certain nearby phrases or sentences (which become “context” by virtue of the exclusion) that serve to clarify the intentions behind the selected words. Comparing this practice to surgical excision, historian Milton Mayer coined the term “contextomy” to describe its use by Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous Nazi broadsheet Der Stürmer in Weimar-era Germany. To arouse anti-semitic sentiments among the weekly’s working class Christian readership, Streicher regularly published truncated quotations from Talmudic texts that, in their shortened form, appear to advocate greed, slavery, and ritualistic murder. Although rarely employed to this malicious extreme, contextomy is a common method of misrepresentation in contemporary mass media, and studies have demonstrated that the effects of this misrepresentation can linger even after the audience is exposed to the original, in context, quote.

In other words, how I make all my art.

See also: “How To Look At Art:”

Don’t worry about unity from piece to piece. What unifies all of your work is the fact that you made it.

I tweeted this a few days ago, and my Twitter friend John T. Unger (@johntunger) replied,

Keep making things. Don’t worry about how it all fits together right now.