Let's Go

On the first week of my last fall semester as an undergraduate student (Aug. 2018), my professor asked the class "what is art?" We all murmured amongst ourselves. She told us to write our answers on a sheet of paper. I wrote, "Art is a movement. It is a different aspect/point of view of society throughout time. One can visualize what was happening and how people were feeling through the art. Art is a visual form of history."

Whether my brief, possibly insufficient, definition of art is accurate, I believe this same thing to be true about the artist. In other words, I think that an artist's work is a visual timeline of their life. This timeline is visible through their music, acting, painting, photography, writing, and even more. Take artists such as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Adele (1988-Present); both different forms of expressing their feelings and both very different time periods yet one can see a "timeline" of their life through their work. Pablo Picasso expresses his love for a new female friend in his paintings and even goes to say they "will do great things together." Adele expresses her heartache(s) and newfound love through her music.

This brings me to say that my own writing has been and will go on to be a timeline of my life. A timeline of what was going through my head while things were happening. My writing has grown as much as I have. Just as I am not done growing (and I don't mean physically, although I would love to be an inch or two taller), my writing is not and will never be done growing. I don't exactly consider myself a writer, although writing is one of my favorite pastimes. I have, however, for as long as I can remember, considered myself a skilled storyteller.

As a second grader, I wrote lengthy, fictional stories about my very real dog on the state exams. I was able to bring my life to fictional life on paper, and not by drawing (though I wished and prayed for very long for the skill of drawing/painting to magically appear at my fingertips).

As a fourth, fifth, and sixth grader, I kept a journal in which I wrote short stories (8/10 of the times, the stories were about dogs, talking dogs in a world without humans). I distracted myself in class by reading fictional chapter books and writing about these fictional talking dogs. I kept my journals a secret, showing them to no one, although I did write in front of my partner in class ('twas in sixth grade, big mistake). The only year I wrote in front of my partner in class was in sixth grade. My partner in this class also happened to be my class bully. He'd rip my erasers, put worms in my desk, and kill my lady bugs. The worst he ever did, however, was tear pages out of my journal and write "loser" and "you suck" on the pages he didn't tear out.

Going through middle school and first half of high school, I strayed away from writing so much about dogs. I started writing about fictional families. I wrote about what I knew. I wrote about fictional children and their friends, and the love a family has for one another. I even came to write a fan-fiction which got 16 thousand readers on Wattpad (it's unfinished and weirdly enough, I can't seem to finish it as much as I have tried, although I am starting to think that maybe I just don't want it to end?).

Nearing the middle/end of high school, I stopped the "textbook definition" of storytelling. I no longer created a life for characters that didn't exist before I put them on paper. I started, for the first time, writing my works in first person. I would still write about dogs, friends, family, and life; the biggest difference was that it was my dogs, my friends, my family, my life. I wrote about what I have learned, mistakes I've made, mistakes others have made; the cold, hard, beautiful, and colorful truth that is my life. I liked what I was writing.

Unlike my stories before, stories in which my skill and growth as a writer was visible, these stories were now a visual timeline of my life. It's one thing to see your life through photographs and home-movies. It's another to see your own life and your own thoughts/point of view through writing.

I don't necessarily consider my writing, my story-telling, an art. I consider myself an artist much less than that. I do think, however, that I can help other while helping myself. "It is, how you say, a win-win".

Watch me grow. Read to grow. Help me help you. Learn with me. Learn from my mistakes, as I will also learn from the mistakes of others. We'll see where this takes me. Let's see where I take you next time.

So, where are we going today?