Writing flows easily for me, yet writing a “piece” is often a challenge. I took a creative writing course during my last quarter at Stanford and found myself in unfamiliar territory: writer's block.
Often, I found myself having clear visions of where a scene would go or what my character would immediately do, but that was it. "What next?" flavored my tongue for weeks at a time. Much of my mental energy was spent attempting to connect distinct scenes, struggling to make the characters move from one room to another, or from one conflict and conversation to the end-game I’d always envisioned.
One story that has been in my head for months now is most vivid as a single image—a shot of a rabbit’s nest, circular, illuminated by early morning, hyper-clear light, with the “Dawn” soundtrack from Pride and Prejudice playing to set the mood. The story is about two men and their relationship and a slew of other characters at an artists’ residency program, yet this is the image I most associate with that story.
Writing my short story for the final project of this class was similar. It too was largely conceived from a few images. I always knew how Pierre (the protagonist) and his skin would glisten from salt crystals. I never thought twice about that, since I felt my own skin itch from that texture in the real world before. Yet I had difficulty imagining what he wanted or what I wanted from him. He was so real to me. I even knew the type of art he would make and exactly what he would say when, but taking him decades out or even days out from an image was always a challenge. I found that I had to work within the visions I had, and that those visions were valid even without linking thoughts.
Writing my short story made me aware of the vignettes that permeate almost all aspects of my creative and imaginative life: from the distinct images that come to me in my head or the imagined conversations I have while daydreaming. This operates similarly to my academic writing which grows from small close readings of single lines or single frames of films rather than a broader sense of argument or personal interest that comes exclusively from within me. Instead, I write mostly from the outside in. My academic work speaks to this—each chapter of my honors thesis grew out of a few key comparisons. A few months later, 113 pages were born.
Writing my short story reminded me of other types of writing I do and the successes I've found elsewhere. I write poetry from all of the images that I seem to consistently encounter. My head produces many, my memories another set, and the coursework in the humanities I've under gone has introduced a broad range of artists into my life. Writing springs forth from these images. I’ve had a portfolio published in a queer poetry journal Assaracus. I forget about that a lot and I find myself having to actively fight against the parts of myself that want to stay within one realm of work and focus in. I do not want to pigeon-hole myself as an academic writer. I do not want to regret claiming any label. I simply want to write whatever comes next for me. While the format may change, I’ve come to realize the writing across my life is indistinguishable: the same questions haunt me, the same phrasing flows from my fingers.
I think about the environment a lot, how flowers burst in what was once air or how water flows in streams as well as the air we breath. I think about art a lot: the images that hang on museum walls or the unnoticed graffiti on street corners. Films come to me in my sleep telling stories from the images my mind produces and remembers.
But words always come with them. Words structure my ability to understand these phenomena. Academic texts explain the history of the fears that reverberate within me, Pablo Neruda taught me to look at the world, and the ever-present rhythms of Serbian and English, Spanish and Italian label the objects around me. Objects are their words, sometimes. They are their colors too, of course, but moving a thought to an idea—something that can be shared and valued, cherished beyond myself, even simply remembered—requires words.
I think this is perhaps how I came to study art history. My thinking process seems to always be rooted in images and the way that looking allows me to tap into the vivid ideas that are ingrained within them. Art history is a discipline that looks carefully and this expectation of intensive analysis resonates with the meditative contemplation I experience as I move around the world—looking and thinking through whatever catches my eye. As I move into the world, away from further schooling for another year at least, I think through the ways that images structure thought—my own thought—and the importance they've attained for my thinking and my writing, which often are one and the same.