The Act Of Writing
Original Post August 28, 2008
There is much resistance towards writing, especially when it comes to the type of person who wields a camera. It is an unfortunate situation. Unfortunate, but one that as an educator I must deal with on a consistent basis. Time and time again I have found that those students who put forth the energy to write about their work, even informally, are the ones who know themselves best. I was recently talking with a friend about how we often think the words we put down are not worthy of seeing the light of day. They aren’t perfect enough, or they aren’t neatly packaged. Below is a a partial response to that conversation.
Words are not all powerful-they are just as ‘mortal’, just as imperfect as our thoughts. So put them down, let them be on the page. Words don’t need to be all lined up in tidy sentences. Words can indeed just be words. Thoughts are often fragmentary and incomplete. Glimpses of a crystalline idea or a diamond in the rough often flicker through my mind, and without some way of holding onto those thoughts-through the written words, rarely do they become photographs. Words can be the bridge between my imperfect mental process and my imperfect images. Through it all I become something new-something more than what I am right now. The process is fraught with imperfections and things that aren’t tidy, but life is sometimes like that, or rather it is usually like that. It has taken me so long to find this bridge. All too often in the past I neglected the process of writing, finding it too hard to put words down in nice neat packages. While doing this is important in the long run, initially it can be just about consciously articulating those random and incomplete thoughts. The most important thing is to put it down and let the words be what they are.
Tags: Creativity, Writing
November 10th, 2008 at 12:49 am
Well said.