WP4: Finding My Roots
Ever since I was very little, even before I was aware of the full extent of the power that words had, I wanted to be a writer. This much I knew.
Looking back, it is clear that I built my whole life around writing. Whether that meant reading stacks upon stacks of books or writing my own chapter books with their imagined trilogies in my head. Growing up surrounded by books and films and television and lyrics, I knew that I wanted to be a creative of some sort. I just happened to be best at writing. And I don’t say this as a means of bragging in any way. I had tried my hand at every creative medium there was; drawing, animation, songwriting, composing, you name it. But my words seemed to fit best when they were creating fictional worlds and people.
That is why I was both unsurprised by my decision to pursue a career in screenwriting, which meant writing stories that would be translated directly into a film or a television show. I had grown comfortable with the freedom of writing in a strictly creative and narrative voice, and I believed wholeheartedly that if I stuck with what I was good at, I would go fast and far.
I was partially wrong. Prior to writing the WPs, I believed that I would not have trouble writing any of them. After all, the prompt gave me the freedom to write about myself, something that I thought came naturally to me as I was able to easily condense the essence of my life and my work in just a few essays for college applications. I had written them in the same sort of narrative-like, train of thought way that I had always written things, and any confidence I had in my ability to write about myself was attributed by the genuinely surprising acceptance letter to my dream university. If I had written about the same things in the same way I had always done, the WPs should be no problem.
This did not turn out to be the case. I had grown accustomed to the specific prompts that were offered by all of my writing classes and even the common application to most universities. The specificity of the prompts gave me roots to grow off of, and from those prompts, I usually let my own creative voice and words allow the branches to grow from those roots naturally. With the WPs, however, I struggled to even take root in one single idea. As it turned out, choosing exactly where to plant your roots before you start writing was much harder than being given the root idea in the first place.
I found that this was because I had so many ideas bouncing around in my head at all times with little means of organizing them into a single coherent thought. I had grown used to simply spilling out my thoughts on a page, usually wildly unfiltered, that displayed both the good and the bad thoughts altogether. It was almost predictable the way I struggled with the idea that all the dizzying thoughts and ideas in my head could be condensed into an organized, structured way.
In a medium that I had spent much of my life making known territory, writing suddenly felt unfamiliar to me, and as I attempted to unlearn my learned habits, my writing often came off as clunky and mechanical to me, lacking any of the warmth or sincerity that usually came to me naturally. For a period of time, I did not recognize myself in my words and it scared me.
It was during this semester in which I stepped out of my comfort zone the most. In terms of structure, it was definitely a continuous balancing act of trying to maintain what made my writing me while also trying to find a way to write for someone else other than myself. I realized that in the past, I was writing mainly from only one perspective, and that was my own, treating writing as a one-way street when it should have been a bridge. During this semester alone, I have learned the value in writing for an audience, in building bridges instead of breaking them down.
Outside of structure, however, I was also stepping out of my comfort zone by being more open and transparent with myself. Truthfully, prior to this semester, the last time I had ever written with such point-blank honesty was on my college applications. However, much of that honesty was attributed to the disconnected feeling I had when writing those pieces. When I was writing them, I treated myself as just another character I had in my head, writing my story from an outsider’s point of view that allowed for the utmost sincerity. It was the kind of honesty you can only get from doctors and lawyers, that type of clinical detachment that was only possible for me at the time because of the anonymity it offered me. To them, I was a character in a novel and the reviewers were just one of the many readers sparing me a glance.
But I found the work I had done this semester to be much more personal, at first uncomfortably so. Incidentally, this semester had come during the age of isolation, during which I mostly had only my thoughts to keep me company. Sometimes these thoughts were welcome. Other times, they were not. Over the course of my work in both my posts and WPs, it becomes evident in my writing when the more unwelcome thoughts began to peek through, whether I wanted them to or not. Fearing vulnerability and being exposed too much, I kept much of my writing and my ideas guarded to a certain extent, sharing just enough to look vulnerable but not actually feel or deal with the consequences of true vulnerability on the page.
I came to quickly realize that I would regret this decision later on. Guarding my thoughts in my writing was an obvious and apparent move that I had made to compensate for something else. I was told to dig deep and reveal who I really was to my audience, but even I could tell that I was holding myself back. I pretended to dig deep but what I was really doing was just scratching at the surface of all these ideas without ever really getting into the core or the actual purpose for writing any of it. This was especially apparent in my WP1 and WP3, which I struggled the most with writing mostly because I had chosen to write about such large, abstract ideas that I felt were fundamental to my identity, which made them all the harder to write about. Advertising myself as a candidate to a college felt like a small feat in the face of having to choose my words wisely enough for not only myself to understand my own thoughts and feelings, but in a way that the audience could understand them too.
Even now, I feel as though my writing has not quite reached the level I want it to be at. However, I know that I am trying. And each day that I try, I am improving. I saw the most improvement in the pieces I was less hesitant about. In all of my posts and my WP2, I had spent less time deliberating on how I was going to breach the boundaries of my comfort zone and more time actually stepping beyond it, easily accessing thoughts and ideas in places where they had previously felt locked up tight when I was working on the WP1 and WP3.
I believe this had very much to do with my own conceptualization of writing as my comfort zone. I had spent so much of my time building walls around my own writing that I had forgotten how to get out of them. I had forgotten how to challenge myself to go past these walls and step into the unknown. And when I was less hesitant, less scared to step past these walls that restricted my creative ability and my own ability to dig deep, my writing was all the better for it. In those moments, writing came naturally to me once again. Instead of pondering for places to set my roots, I let the root of my ideas find a place of their own. And those trees, those writing pieces that were the closest to my heart and mind, grew much taller than the trees that I had spent hours obsessing and micromanaging over.
All in all, this semester was a lesson in planting. If I had just decided to stay planted in one spot, and never change my style of writing or challenge myself to write about bigger, more abstract ideas, then I would have never learned how to step outside of my comfort zone in order to improve.
