How do You Express Yourself?

In today's world, in order to properly express yourself you need to be able to write.  Whether it's Facebook updates, tweets, or texts, we are now coming into a world where writing is an even more important form of communication.  Being an English major, one would think that I like to write or that I'm good at it; ironically it's not my favorite thing to do and sometimes I do struggle when writing.

Rather than write poems or stories to express my ideas, I prefer images over words.  However, the process of photography is similar to the process of writing.  Before you even begin snapping photos, I feel that one has to figure out where you are going and what you will find when you get there.  Furthermore, you have to figure out why you are going out and taking photography, in writing this is figuring out your audience and determining your argument.  When taking a photograph, you want to try different lenses or angles to try to find a unique angle that catches the attention of the viewer.  Then after spending hours taking hundreds of photos, you must go through and pick ones that are actually worth editing.  Sometimes it is a serious struggle to determine between two similar photographs which one is worth your immediate attention.  Then comes the editing process:  bringing out contrast, softening edges, brightening, darkening, cropping.  In writing, I would consider this to be a combination between the editing and revising processes.  

A couple of years ago I grabbed my camera and a couple of friends and headed to the graveyard near campus.  It was ideal out:  Fall had begun, leaves were on the ground, and it was sprinkling.  We spent hours wandering around the graveyard taking photos of each other and interesting artifacts left by visitors.  Then, cold and wet, we trudged back home and I immediately loaded my memory card and sifted through my hundreds of photographs.  For that one trip, I came out with about ten edited photographs from my couple hundred raw images.  There are many different editing programs online, at the time my favorite is FotoFlexer.  It may seem easy, but I feel that editing photos is one of the most important part to photography.  I don't use editing to fix my photo, but rather enhance it.  After hours of work I got something like this:

This is my favorite photograph that I've ever taken.

Throughout my lifetime, I've discovered that I prefer recreational photography rather than assigned; this is the same for my writing.  If it's something assigned I find myself not as invested in the writing which in turn reflects writing that is not my best.  When I get the urge to write, you usually don't see me for days.  I'll stay holed up somewhere just to get as much of the story out as I can.  I say "out" and not "written down" because I have this nasty habit of not finishing my stories.  I think through my stories that I don't want to write them down because I already know how they end.  My problem with writing is that I don't have the discipline to schedule out a time so I can sit down and work on whatever I am writing.

Earlier I mentioned that I find myself a better recreational writer, however I do appreciate it when my teachers or instructors expect a piece of writing from me.  I found that I actually enjoyed my short stories I wrote for my fictional writing class, even if I found myself loathing sitting down to write it.  I even find myself disliking updating my Facebook status; there are days where I just don't have anything insightful to say and I hate putting up pointless posts.  

I feel that bringing this perspective to my classroom will yield a very interesting writing program in my classroom.  I think I'm going to have the students primarily write on topics they want to write.  There will, of course, be times where I need them to write on a specific thing.  However, I feel that in real life, we write on what interests us.  I think being invested in what you write on is one of the best ways to craft a quality paper. I want my students to want to express themselves, and if some express themselves best through photography, Facebook posts, or stories I want to promote that in my classroom.