There is really no one way to do mystory: no single method. Rather, it is up to each writer to determine a method appropriate to his/her situation. In each of Ulmer's books, he gives possible starting points that are connected to his current project:

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• In Applied Grammatology, he emphasizes the name. Ulmer pics up the name again in Text Book and gives a number of possible assignments. Here is a particularly apt one:
  Drawing on all the readings and exercises provided in this chapter relevant to the proper name, write a text exploring the words and information that may be generated out of your given and surnames. First, identify a "key list" of such terms and topics, then construct a composition (organized as much for aesthetic effect as for the exposition of your discoveries) by writing out a variety of presentations expanding your vocabulary into an account of the third level of the signature. To make the original list, you should use every available means to find the common nouns or names that translate your proper names into ordinary discourse. Check the dictionary definitions in the original language of your heritage, as well as encyclopedic dictionaries relevant to names. You may also use poetic techniques to produce words out of your names—puns and anagrams might be especially useful. You might also want to include photocopied images depicting the things you find in your names. Several of the readings suggest analogies which might guide your experiment: think of the assignment as a written version of your coat of arms (a kind of improvised blazooning) or as a nicknaming process. Comment along the way on any signs of fate or destiny you notice in the results of your research. Are you "well-named"? Remember finally that the goal of the project is to take whatever material your name provides and turn it into a model for a theory (general description) of how to write. (337)

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• In Teletheory, he offers mystoryiography, which combines personal, popular, and disciplinary discourses (what he later calls the popcycle). Here is the assignment he offers before producing his own mystory:
  Write a mystory bringing into relation your experience with three levels of discourse—personal (autobiography), popular (community stories, oral history, or popular culture), expert (disciplines of knowledge). In each case use the punctum or sting of memory to locate items significant to you; once located, research the representations of the popular and expert items in the collective archive or encyclopedia (thus mixing living and artificial memories). Select for inclusion in your text fragments of this information most relevant to the items in your oral life story. Arrange the entries to highlight the chance associations that appear among the three levels. Organize the fragments by means of one or the other (or both) of the following formats:

  1) vita minor: a resume including entries representing the sources of your "images of wide scope" in your personal and community background. The vita minor lists those aspects of your experience that tend to be excluded from the conventional resume presented to prospective employers or granting agencies.

  2) puncept: set of the fragments collected on the basis of a single shared feature.

  In both orders the disciplinary discourse may be drawn from your major, or from a discipline in which you have a potential career interest. You may substitute for, or intermix with, the disciplinary discourse fragments on the topic of a major catastrophe (which may or may not be the catastrophe of Aushwitz or Hiroshima). If you are making a mystory not simply to represent to yourself the genralization of your signature into an inventio, but to discover new points of entry into a specific problem, replace the catastrophic materials with information on that problem. The same format may be be used to translate between expert and popular discourses. (209)

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• In Heuretics, he puts forward chorography and the CATTt. He notes that his version of this writing practice in Heuretics is an experiment, not a direct model to follow. For those who chose to do their own such experiment, he offers three possibilties:

  1) The most general level of Ulmer's "method" is to use the CATTt (contrast, analogy, target, theory, tale) and fill in the heuristic slots with your own choices. Your choice might be random, or motivated by curiosity about a particular theory, discourse, genre, purpose, or place. Your experiment should be evaluated either by what you learn through the process or what type of text the process produces. In other words, rather than be concerned with replicating Ulmer's experiment, the goal is to learn something or invent something.

  2) A second level at which to experiment with the CATTt is to accept Ulmer's CATTt (C= argumentative writing; A= Method acting; T= Derrida; T= hypermedia; t= cinema remake) but to use your own particulars for some or all of the materials—"a different popular work for the remake, different emotional memories for the rehearsal, a different aspect of Derrida's writings, and so on" (39).

  3) The general name for creating a method out of theory is heuretics, the particular name of the method Ulmer generates in Heuretics is chorography. So a third, more specific, way to re-enact Ulmer's experiment is to do chorography. Ulmer notes that chorography is close to choreography, but he is more specifically thinking about geography. In the discipline of geography, "chorological analysis" tries to capture a more specific, subjective experience (understanding) of space than a generic, scientific one. Such an analysis attempts to "capture the particular connections between people and places" (40). Chorography, then, is "not a recipe" but "an evocation of the attitudes and strategies specific to a specific practice" (41). A sense of place is inscribed in a tale (Ulmer's remake of Beau Geste to theorize electronic writing, Plato's use of myth (tied to a particular place) in Phaedrus to form a symbolic network for the practice of dialectics, Descartes's use of autobiography to ground his rationalist method, and Freud's use of his own dreams to develop psychoanalysis). Inventing a method is always situated in a place and a story serves "as a 'place' within which the theory may be displayed" (42). Find your place, chose your story, invent your method.

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• In Text Book, he focuses on Roland Barthes's alphabetic approach and models. Ulmer notes that Barthes's Text, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments provides a set of instructions for his rhetorical experiment. Here is Barthes's recipe (a recipe in this instance is a set of instructions that one follows loosely, adding new ingredients or changing the process, rather than a strict formula) and two two related assignments Ulmer gives that follow Barthes's model:

  1) Each of Barthes's fragments follow this recipe:

  A. Selecting the figures:
  1. Each separate fragment is one figure, pose, or topic. The lover's situation includes a set of poses that anyone who enters into a dating relationship is likely to emply. . . . Courting is a "ritual" process. With the term pose, Barthes alludes not only to "role playing" but also to dance figures, a standardized set of movements with which a choreographer might design a ballet.
  2. A figure in the lover's discourse is recognizable to the extent that it is something clearly outlined as memorable. "You know you have a figure when you can say 'That is so true: I recognize that scene of language'."
  B. Writing the figures:
  1. Each figure ot topic has a title ("Show me whom to desire), a heading ("induction"), and an argument ("The loved being is desired because another . . ."). The point of departure for a figure is always something the lover might say, even if only to himself or herself, perhaps only unconsciously, in that situation (hence the discourse). The argument is a paraphrase describing that saying. The figures are arranged in alphabetical order, according to the spelling of the headings (hence the translator had to retain the French—cacher comes before coeur).
  2. Of the body (numbered paragraphs), the following may be observed:
  a) Only the topic headings and arguments are general. The meditations or reflections recorded within each topic will be specific to each user of the discourse, who must fill in the figure with his or her own experience (thoughts, feelings, actions) of the pose.
  b) The figures do not tell the love story, but instead record the "asides" that might accompany the story, as if one had kept a running commentary on one's experience (not in the manner of a diary, but an analysis, like the color commentary that embellishes the action of a sports broadcast).
  c) The content of the commentary in the body is drawn from a combination of three areas of reference, each acknowledged briefly in the margins:
  (1) a primary work of art relevant to the concerns of the discourse (Barthes focuses on Geothe's Sorrows of Young Werther)
  (2) the speaker's specialized culture (schooling, training)
  (3) the speaker's everyday life culture (popular arts, mass media experience, conversations with friends, and the like)
  (Text Book 263-64)

  2) Ulmer also gives a variety of prompts for discussion and writing. Here is one I find particularly relevant.

  One way to test the validity and value of an experiment is to see if it is replicable, or if it is applicable to other problems or issues. Write a set of figures, titled Fragments of a Student's Discourse, modeled after Barthes's Fragments, applying Barthes's form and procedure to the discourse of the student. You are to write about the conventions and stereotypes of the student experience, identifying the conventions and cliches, figures and poses, myths and expectations of the student life. Do for the student's lifestyle what Barthes did for the lover's style of conduct. Use the following questions to guide your extrapolation from the lover's to the student's discourse:

  Are any of the figures used in the lover's discourse also relevant to the student's discourse? Of the one's that might be directly translatable across discourses, do they mean the same thing, or function the same way, in both contexts? Some of the figures may not be directly transferable but might have equivalents in the new setting. For example, if the heart is the organ of love sentiment, would the brain be equivalent for the student's situation? What does it mean to be "a brain"? Is this the same as having one? Can a student be too brainy? What are the sources of a student's anxiety, hope, joy, pain? What are the crucial moments or events in a student's life? Where does this scene of life and language begin? Where does it end? What objects are important to a student? What words, phrases, sayings, cliches preside over our lives as students? (Text Book 272-73)

  (I ask my students who are currently teachers or planning to become teachers to substitute teacher's for student's in the above prompt, thinking about past teachers and their experiences of those teachers as models or figures for the type of teacher they are or will become.)

  3) The following list breaks down [all of Ulmer's] previous suggestions into a set of "ingredients" and a "recipe," or the procedure for composing a research text. Feel free to modify these steps and add others of your own. The goal is to transform Barthes's tutor text into the prototype for a genre of research text.

  1. The "ingredients" for this research text include the following:

  a. An incident from the past that sticks in your memory
  Reflect on memories of growing up, from early childhood through high school graduation. Think of a specific incident or event that comes to mind without too much effort. One technique for locating a good incident to work with is to make a list of the ideological categories of identity (gender, class, ethnicity, race, religion, sexuality, nationality). Our society has an ideal set of expectations for how these categories are to be fulfilled, but almost no person fits the ideals. Reflect on any incident that expresses your sense of a lack of fit between you and the ideal of one of these categories. Who was enforcing the ideal (from what institution: family, church, school, peer group, popular media)? The incident may be modest, not necessarily dramatic, but just a symptom of tension between your reality and the ideal expectation. Another way to select the incident is to think of a turning point in your experience, some event that marked a choice, a decision, perhaps a realization only in retrospect that you passed a crossroad and took one path and not the other.
  

  b. A story
  The story may be in any genre and medium-book, movie, television, song, or comic book. One way to select the story is to find one that you remember, that stuck in your memory for whatever reason, something that you read, saw, or heard while you were growing up. Another approach is to select a story that you have not read but that is considered an important work of literature or art.

  2. The "recipe" or procedure for composing the text

  a. One option is to emulate the form of Barthes's Fragments. Review the outline in the introduction to A Lover's Discourse, "Writing the figures." Organize your text as a series of figures, including all the elements: topic and title, numbered paragraphs, with your choice of story and personal incident, supplemented by your "specialized culture." A good resource for the asides based on specialized culture is Text Book itself. Your text then creates an assemblage based on associations that you draw among your story, the life incident, and the readings of Text Book.
  

  b. A good way to work with an unfamiliar story is to adapt the technique of Method acting. The narrative of the story is organized by a conflict. The protagonist desires something, and there is some obstacle preventing the fulfillment of the desire. If you were going to act the part of this character using the Method, you would produce a personal emotional memory to help define your performance. Compose your text as an assemblage of fragments, juxtaposing the details of the story conflict with the details of an incident from your own experience that may be associated emotionally with the story problem. It is not that your experience is the same as the one in the story, but that there is some common thread linking the two. For an actor the common thread is an emotion. If the character is angry or afraid, the actor thinks of some experience involving anger or fear and uses sensory details of that memory to understand the feelings of the character.
  

  c. A third possibility is to reverse the direction of emotional understanding from that used in the Method. After deciding on the personal experience, select a story that reveals or expresses the feeling or state of mind that you remember or associate with the personal experience. There is no need to name the feeling in abstract or conceptual terms; the point is to recover or locate the feeling through the act of writing. The form again is an assemblage based on Barthes's Fragments. The basic devices are juxtaposition, repetition, and variation, assembled to produce a kind of "allegory" relating the life experience to the story problem. In this case, however, there is likely to be just one figure—the metaphor between you and the story. For example, suppose the book is Melville's Moby Dick, and the memory concerns your first summer job. You would not necessarily make an explicit comparison ("The boss paced in his kitchen like Ahab on the deck of the Pequod") but instead use concrete language to record selected details, from the two domains, so that the comparison could emerge indirectly.

  3. As an alternative to using the figures formula from Barthes's Fragments, produce a new form or recipe from the examples collected in the archive. Analyze each example to locate its procedures for relating a life experience to a story. Collect these devices into a set and restate them as instructions for making a research text. Then follow your own instructions, using your own life incident and preferred story. (Text Book 274-75)

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• In Internet Ivention, . . .

  
  
  

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