Here are some photos from Tom Hart‘s afternoon workshop. Using a Power Point presentation and having all the students do a series of sketches and notes on index cards, Tom laid out his ideas about story generation and developing accumulations of images and ideas into all kinds of stories. The ideas and activities come out of his work-in-progress, How to Say Everything, his take on a What It Is kind of book (he’s said to me that the closest model is probably John Gardner’s Art of Fiction). You can read portions of the work as he develops it here.
Two index cards juxtaposed after having been created in different activities.
One of Tom’s index card boxes that he uses to store and organize all his ideas and images–story ideas, notions, scraps of drawings, and so on. This particular boxes is devoted to a new book length comic he has been developing. I can’t wait to see some new long-form Hart!
Discussing the finished one-page comics. They were all quite good and I can definitely see a couple of them getting developed in to longer works.Stay tuned.
Thanks for having me, Matt.
The quick pieces were great, and I do hope to see more of a few of the character/idea combinations that turned up.
I’m never sure if this exercise should have a more concrete finish- i.e., “start with anything in front of you and your last panel must be xxx.” It’s my hope that this has given people enough ingredients to cook their own soup. Sometimes I worry that the ideal finish would be to tell them exactly that it has to be Ukranian Borscht, say, or Miso or Tomato Bisque.
I think we saw in class that most people had enough material by the end of the activity to come up with a short story or at least a riff. It could be interesting though to give them all an image or phrase that they ALL have to use in the last panel. It might lead to a little comparative study of how people solve creative problems.