Pictures Don't Always Say A Thousand Words

Jenni Larsen
English 1010
19 January 2010

"Hey Jenni, what's another word for nickers?"
"Jack, what the hell are you talking about?"
"Ya know, those little swoopy pants? Is there another word for them, something that is not so... cute?"
This was the main commentary of an average day in my high school honors creative writing class. The structure was lax, the population small, consisting of eight or nine sarcastic and mischievous, but also talented high school juniors and seniors. I don't recall how I ended up taking this class, before taking this class I was hardly interested in creating a thirty page short story in one semester, but then again, it wasn't until after the add/drop date had passed that we found out that we would be required to create the thirty pages for the class' final project.
As a young teenager I was encouraged to keep a journal, which always appealed to me, but I never really had much interest in. It was a pain to write down things that happened to me, and it felt tedious to basically transcribe meaningless events to an unknown audience. I was forced to keep a journal, or list of events, when I left the country for the first time. I was in eighth grade and a small school group was traveling to southern Mexico to study Spanish. I found myself dreading the allotted time set aside for studying and journal writing. I got out of turning in a journal, and instead put together a series of photographs I had made throughout the trip.
From the time I received my first little, pink, plastic Barbie camera for my sixth birthday, I have always had a camera. I moved in and out of passion for the hobby, from buying disposable cameras for the sole purpose of having photo shoots with my cats and siblings, to now attending professional photojournalism workshops. For a long time, I considered photography to be enough and writing completely lost its appeal.
Before my creative writing class, I had done some writing, but never to the extent that I completed in that class. My interest for writing was truly sparked when I took a class entitled "On The Road". We read and wrote travel essays and even took field trips, as well as a weekend trip, and wrote about them. It was a great way to expand my writing confidence. Writing about something as concrete and personal as an adventure came easily and joyfully to me. During this travel literature class we took a school trip to Moab and were required to turn in a personal narrative about something that we learned on our trip to Moab. For the first time in my life I was able to capture something with writing that I was not able to portray through my photography. Although I had my camera the whole time that the story took place, the emotion my writing was able to invoke was something that the photos from the trip could not.
After a trip to Turkey I took the travel literature class once again. I had just spent a month in Turkey, and yet my photography portfolio hadn't grown all that much. Throughout the trip I found myself trying to write things down, in order to remember the amazing experiences in the amazing culture. I found myself getting bored by even reading what I had written, and I became depressed about the trip. With most of the people in the travel literature class having gone on the trip, Turkey became an easy assignment base. We worked with sensory writing, trying to get the audience to feel, hear, taste, and smell what Turkey was like through our writing. Some of my favorite pieces that I have ever written came from those sensory exercises. I felt myself slipping back through time and across oceans and countries as I wrote about my experiences, using concrete emotions and details. I had the personal narrative area of writing down, but creative writing still made me nervous.
I have never been to Mars, but according to my most famous piece of writing, I have been. It started out as an apology note to my best friend, but then turned into a story I wrote and turned into my high school AP English class. The assignment was to write about someone who had influenced our lives, but in a creative way, whatever that meant. I had never been good at coming up with a story out of the blue, I had only taken events in my life and recreated them on paper. But this time, I exaggerated. No, my best friend and I didn't literally fly to the moon in a cardboard box, but my audience didn't need to know that. I took a simple summer evening and turned it into a piece of writing that I was proud of, and apparently it was even considered good enough to be published.
The camera is still my number one medium for sharing the stories of the world, but I have found that my own emotion can more effectively be portrayed through my writing. The stories I have experienced are more powerful and more confidently told by letting my thoughts and emotions tumble from my head onto the paper. I used to think that I had to choose a medium for storytelling, but I have come to a place in life where I know that I can have my camera in one hand and a pencil in the other.