wp4: the role of writing
In the past I mostly thought about writing in terms of the final result. This might be due to assignments for class being graded as a product, which has in turn made the final result the most important thing to me. But throughout this semester I have learned about the value of the writing process itself, through which I have learned about myself.
This semester we have been encouraged again and again to create idea-driven writing. The way I have come to interpret “idea-driven” is writing with a big-picture purpose, and it is this purpose that drives the smaller ideas within the piece. After understanding WHY I am writing, I then figure out WHAT to actually write, and in doing so, I ask myself a lot of questions. In finding answers to these questions, that’s the “BECAUSE”, and this is what fulfills the purpose of my writing. This process has made writing far more meaningful, because my writing often ended up being more about what I learned during the process of questioning myself and finding answers to those questions, than what I already knew before I started writing.
In my scriptwriting class (CTWR 413), I have been learning about how to write a compelling short story, which, although very different from the writing we did in WRIT 150, can also be connected. When designing an interesting character, that character should have a clearly defined plot goal and inner need. An interesting story comes from their pursuit of the plot goal in order to fulfill their deep and personal inner need. Writing is a similar process, where writing the paper is the plot goal and the purpose for writing is like the inner need. An interesting piece of writing comes from the pursuit of writing the paper in order to fulfill the purpose. Maybe it’s a silly analogy but it helps me better understand making writing meaningful and a way of learning.
Specifically, I have learned about seeing myself as important, which sounds extremely egocentric but I will explain. I’ve gone through a significant portion of my life thinking I’m boring, I’m normal, I’m average. This doesn’t come from a place of lacking self worth; it just comes from being used to being me, where “me” is just the norm. As a result of this perspective, my identity, my thoughts, and my feelings feel unimportant. However this semester we have been writing a lot about our identities: how did we get here, what is our intellectual identity, why are we the way we are? In writing about these topics, I discovered things about myself that I do think are important.
In blog posts such as “my growth through dance” and “what I learned from attending an ‘elite’ STEM high school,” and especially my WP2 (an archive on my intellectual journey with photography), I reflected on some specific parts of my life that have made me a unique individual. The writing process has helped me appreciate myself more and become more self-aware of how my choices in life help shape who I am and who I will be in the future.. Recognizing myself as a unique individual is healthy for me as a person in general, but understanding myself is also important to me as a cinematographer, because how I tell the stories I tell is all about my identity and background shaping my creative choices.
One of the first things I learned about was how important it is that I am now pursuing my passions. In both my first blog post “16mm film emulation” and my WP1, I wrote about finding a purpose in life through photography and film. I’ve recognized in the past that doing what I love would make me happier, but in the process of writing and thinking about the significance of doing what I love, I discovered that, since transferring from computer science to film, I’m not just happier, but I feel ALIVE. I’m more proactive about doing everything because I want to make time for projects I’m excited about. I make better use of my downtime, listening to filmmaking podcasts while doing the dishes for example, because constantly learning drives me closer to my dreams. I learned that transferring wasn’t just a shallow decision to make myself happy, it was a decision that is allowing me to live a more fulfilling life.
Perhaps the most fulfilling writing experience for me was my WP3. I’m not as proud of the end result as I am with my WP2, but I learned a tremendous amount about myself. The purpose of my WP3 was to write about how I engage with the world through photography. In writing to fulfill this purpose, I asked myself several questions that I didn’t know the answer to: Why do I choose to photograph what I photograph? What do I find beautiful? Why is photography so meaningful to me? I won’t bother summarizing the whole paper, but it was tremendously satisfying to finally figure out answers to these questions that I have wondered about for years but never had the chance to really think about. I learned that I find photography fulfilling for myself because it helps me love life. I constantly have a lot of love and appreciation for others, and this realization helps me also love and appreciate my own life. I also learned about some other smaller things, such as finally understanding what I find beautiful about sadness, and I wrote more about this in my blog post “opposites”.
One other thing we learned about this semester is using writing as a space to be ourselves. I think I have only partially achieved this. I have used writing as a space to be vulnerable, admitting when my ego has gotten too big, how much I struggled in high school, how insecure I was about not being able to dance, and more. I think in this way, I am being myself in my writing because I’m being very honest with myself. But at the same time, I still haven’t been able to figure out how to put much of my personality into my writing, and that’s still something I will continue to work on in the future. (Or maybe it’s already there, but since it’s my own personality I just don’t recognize it. Hmm…)
I’ve often had a love/hate relationship with writing, where sometimes I find writing to be boring and tedious, but this class has certainly taught me to love writing again. I will continue to use writing as a space of learning and discovery, and to always write for myself and aim to get something meaningful out of the writing process, even if the end goal is to just to complete an assignment.
