The act of writing.
The following is my essay called 'The Act of Writing'. This is one of the first essays I had to turn in. In it, I wrote about how a certain place has affected my writing. I decided to write about a local theatre that I have become involved with. There, I learned a lot of new things and was introduced to a new style of writing.
the_act_of_writing.odt | |
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Many great things happen to people by chance. One example being how I found myself onstage. I believe that life develops like a RPG type video game, aside from the basic fate being a set course to happen. Every second in your life, every choice you make, causes your path to change. The smallest events in my life had led me to where I am now, and it has affected my writing.
Coming to Forestview, I tried to be involved with the school. One way was by joining a club, and that club was called “Forestview Inc.”. I joined this club with a friend of mine from middle school, she was the main reason I joined because she didn't want to be in it alone. While being part of this club, there was an event held called “Poetry Palooza” where I read a poem in. The event was held at The Schiele Museum, and there were a lot of teenagers and young people there reading. The poem I read was called “Meet Me Under The Moonlit Sky”, which was short and basically about a woman trying to get her lover to commit suicide with her. I read my poem in front of about a hundred people, and it was my first time speaking in front of a big group in general. I met a guy there who was also reading something, but it was for a school project. This guy’s name was Ryan, and he knew one of my friends who was in the club with me. I met a few new people that night, but he stuck out the most, and we started dating.
While getting to know this guy, I found out that he was doing his first show at a place called The Little Theatre of Gastonia. Naturally, I went to see it. The show was Narnia the musical, and it was the first show I saw that theatre. Watching everyone on stage, singing, and dancing made me feel very happy. I couldn’t help but smile the whole time, I even teared up a bit. The show was put together very well, and everyone had the cutest costumes on. Most of the characters in Narnia are animals, so everyone was wearing normal clothing with their animal hinted in the style. The face paint was really good, everything was just really good, and I couldn’t help but think to myself “I want to do that.” I’ve always had a general interest in the subject, but every show I saw inspired me to audition. The thought of being on stage in a pretty costume singing and dancing lured me in. I was determined to start my high school career off great, and fill it with fun and theatre.
Unfortunately, there are mean people in the world, and I had to find out the hard way. It was the start of a new semester and I met a certain girl who had trouble at home, and I became friends with her. We had our little group in classes and lunch that cared for one another. This certain girl ended up dating a notorious “man-ho” who was known for dating girls for one single thing, physical interaction. Normal friends would be concerned when another friend enters a relationship with a bad guy, and we all voiced our concern for her. This backfired on us, and she started fighting with me and a friend of mine especially. She mainly went out of her way to start fights with us, and we eventually retaliated after a long period of harassment. This ended with me having to go to therapy, and I told my parents that I was wanting to use theatre to deal with stress and emotions. I got the idea from Ryan, because we had talked about stress and depression and theatre was how he helped himself cope with it.They supported my idea, and it eventually got me out of therapy.
This is where Ryan became useful. Having gone and seen a show he was in, I learned about a local theatre. They were having a summer camp, like they do every summer, and my mom signed me up for it. While I was in this camp I learned about costume design, set design, stage direction, and lighting. I started to see the functions of a play. I began think of stories and their lighting, set, costumes, stage direction, and costumes. So far, it seems, I’ve lost my ability to write long stories with descriptive paragraphs. Describing a set with lights and music seems much easier, and that’s what I started doing.
I played around at first with little skits, simple dialogue that wouldn’t go anywhere. Then I moved to something bigger in my second semester of my sophomore year. I started writing a play, it was simple and silly, but still a whole play. I wrote it in the free time in classes, at night, whenever I could think of something. By the time I had finished it, it was handwritten and thirty two pages long. I finished a snarky one act about a seventeen year old girl who tries to make friends at school, and fails, then cleans up the mess she had made. I basically took my thoughts about how dumb teenagers are, exaggerated them, and put them into a story. Typing it up helped me fix the stage directions, and clear up the set description. It was something I had fun doing, and the format seemed simple for me. With that, new stories came to me. I could see them being set up and acted out on stage, I transfer what I see to paper and create my own stories.