WP4: To Write or Not to Write
My relationship with writing started off with outrage and an idea. By way of loving animals, I became an environmentalist by age seven and the disaster of animal extinctions plagued my nascent understanding of ecosystems. I needed a way to contribute to the struggle for wildlife conservation, but didn’t know where to start. As a part of my after school extracurriculars, I had been participating in musicals at a youth theatre company. Herein lies the answer I came to on how to fight the good fight. There was no musical I knew that was telling the story I wanted to tell, so it was up to me. In all my seven-year-old glory, I opened up a new document on my home desktop computer and started writing my original musical: Save the Animals. Obviously, it’s completely hilarious to look back on me and four of my friends singing acapella off-key about saving the world by feeding animals and stopping people from hurting them. But this started a writing journey for me that encouraged a lifetime of environmental activism and provided self assurance.
This semester elucidated both the way I want to tell a story as it relates to the rest of the world, and how much of my own story I want to share, or need to share, to craft a powerful, impactful piece. While I took advanced writing in high school, reintegrating writing into my life this semester has, at times, been painful. I find writing doesn’t come easily to me. I’ve never considered myself a writer because I only relied on writing when I felt I had no other options like for school mandated work. It was a means to a school mandated end. The biggest challenge at the beginning of this semester was finding the “why” to writing. I understand why USC made me take this class, but less about what purpose my writing would serve a reader. Listening to my classmates discuss their topics for papers and posts, I found myself envious that they had so much to say. I’m an actor. I know how to memorize text and create a character, but making my own words felt daunting. Part of what I love about acting is that I don’t have to write anything; everything I’m supposed to say out loud is written by someone else.That responsibility doesn’t fall on me. I can focus on making the words come to life through the character. But this semester I’ve had to evolve, considering the efficacious and the nuanced like never before.
Art is about storytelling and storytelling feels like the purpose in my life as an artist. In this semester, I’ve discovered that writing is a huge part of storytelling, and a great medium to explore the depth and intricacies of a story. Writing became the central focus for me this semester because of WRIT150, and not just because it’s a difficult class. I have always struggled with writing, and being thrust into a class on writing acquainted me with failure. Failure is supposed to be character-building and generate resilience, but that doesn’t eliminate the urge to give up every time I don’t do as well as I hoped. However, the feedback I receive not only improves the immediate assignment but strengthens my writing prowess.
My relationship to writing has changed this semester in that, through my struggles, I’ve come to understand that writing can help me explore my identity in relation to the world. It has given me an intellectual basis on which to plant my observations. Before I took this course, I felt emotions like shame or pride as part of my identity without understanding why. Writing gave me the space to explore the depths of those emotions and tie them into the readings we studied, and the world around me. Being able to bridge the gap between emotional and intellectual understanding accompanied a renewed appreciation for my identity and the ways in which different identities communicate with one another.
The modern world provides an abundance of ways to communicate. Because there are so many avenues of communication, we tend to devalue the simplest communications and overshare our thoughts to the world. Social media creates a space where everyone can share everything they are thinking and feeling all the time. Being subjected to what feels like an onslaught of different, sometimes harmful or offensive opinions can be aggravating and create meaningless conflict that destroys any real attempt at communication. I was worried that this same phenomena would occur in our posts this semester because the subjects were up to us and we had so many opportunities to write. Instead, I saw my classmates and I decided what part of our opinions were needed for the discourse as we thoughtfully chose what to write about. Rather than misusing the writing with extraneous details, I painstakingly mulled over subjects I wanted to write about and asked myself, “What do I really add to this discourse?”
Learning what I want to write about and what is necessary for me to write about shaped how I viewed my identity through the lens of writing. It allowed me the space to decide before I said what I wanted to say and the ability to step back and reevaluate what I said after I’d written it. These advantages are unique to writing and make me feel more purposeful in how I evaluate a subject. I have discovered that writing gives the writer an ability to think before they speak; it allows for the time to give an author a sense of the permanence of written work. In a society where everyone shares all the time, I had to edit out or revise how my words were shared and reconsider what my message ultimately should be.
My journey with writing has been a complicated “push and pull” into who I want to be and what I want to learn and how I want to impact others. My WP1 is private and unlisted, only being shared with my classmates and professor and while it’s probable that those people are the only ones who would have read the work, I made a conscious choice not to share it. I like having the power to choose whether or not to share it publicly. It is important to me that writing gives me that ability to choose what I feel is needed in the world and when I don’t think my story is important enough to share or too private to lose anonymity. I wish that more people understood the value of privacy. The very nature of our increasingly public world should allow us to keep some things private instead of feeling the need to share everything all the time.
