writinghistory-445-blog

[writinghistory-445-blog]

The general perception of this picture would probably be, “you have way too many wires and pop figures…” and I would be inclined to agree with that statement. Except for the fact that I think a lot of my digital identity happens to be showcased within those wires. I have my television, my laptop, my video game systems, my video games, and all of my movies showcased in this photo; aka all of the technological devices that have turned me into the tech inclined individual I am today. Not to mention that this picture was taken on my iPhone, the only thing I have taken a picture on since about 2013. The internet has been a huge part of my existence since the days of dial-up (remember asking if anyone was on the phone before you started to boot up the computer?) and grown with me as we push ourselves further and further into the technological world. The internet is even how I consume most of my news, television shows, and movies, all of which have shaped me into the popular culture connoisseur I am today. What I don’t think a lot of people know about me is the fact that video games have been such an influence on my life and really do have a strong impact on digital media. The way video games can tell stories in creative and interactive ways can be profoundly lost by the news outlets who are constantly reporting out the negative effects video games have on children. There have been video games that have ripped my heart of my chest as I have made some of the most difficult and heartbreaking choices in my life. There is a game called The Last of Us that came out in 2013 and I believe to be the most heartbreaking and amazing story ever told through a digital platform. The story of the game is that you play as a character named Joel who lives in a post-Apocalyptic America that is littered with zombie-like creatures. From that small description, I would say that it sounds like a classic zombie story that is filled with gore and violence as you kill zombies. But, another aspect to the game is that Joel finds a fourteen-year-old girl named Ellie who happens to be immune to the zombie virus and it becomes Joel’s job to protect her and lead her across the United States to a group of scientists who will cure humanity through any means necessary, even killing the girl who carries the cure in order to gain access to her gene sequence. This particular game makes the decision for you in the end which is saving the girl over the rest of the world, but your own morals start to cloud over your perception of Joel. Was it selfish of him to risk the entire world? Would I have done the same thing in order to protect someone I loved? When video games can make me cry the way that this one had,it makes me wish people could watch these stories play out in order to see the amazing detail that goes into writing these narratives. And there are also incredible visuals and graphic designing that go into creating some of these games. I am a huge believer in video games being used as positive influences and I actually do want to find a way to somehow incorporate them into my classroom in the future. I think that if I were to just completely ignore the way that video games have affected my digital identity would be a huge mistake on my part. In fact, the biggest digital community that I have become apart of is the community of gamers that play these different games online. Because of my involvement in online gaming, I have met other individuals who are just as passionate about gaming as me and they are able to really understand where I am coming from when I say that videogames are an important part of digital media. When I have a long day at work, and I know that I can sit down at the end of the night to just log on to Playstation Network and play a few quick rounds of multiplayer with people across the world, then I feel good, like I could just forget about the responsibilities I have in Rhode Island and be anywhere else in the world. Of course, I understand the risks of using video games and social media in the classroom. Having to warn students about the dangers of online predators and listening to everyone on the internet are my two main concerns. Not to mention that not every video game will be exactly “appropriate” for some school age students, but neither are movies that are sometimes shown in class. I believe that in the future, I could use a game like The Last of Us to discuss intersectionality and issues around gender and race which would be awesome. But, obviously, I couldn’t play the entire twelve hours of story mode in class, but maybe something as quick as viewing one particular scene where some of the only black characters are killed off within an hour of gameplay. I never said the game was perfect but, it’s definitely something I could use to discuss analysis of text. Honestly, as a twenty-one year old in this day and age, I’m quite proud of the extensive digital identity I have gained from all of these different digital mediums because it has made me a lot more aware of the way the world is moving and how I can continue to grow with it.

#writing history

[writinghistory-445-blog]

Sometimes I have to step back and look at where I have started. When I kept my first full length journal that I filled front to back, I was sixteen years old and from there, I have filled about five more and I am working on three separate ones right now. The only reason I have three separate journals is because I happened to keep finding journals that I thought were really cool looking. My latest one is made out of recycled materials and is designed with a Pegasus on the cover, and I wanted nothing more than to start writing in it even though I had a leather bound journal that I had started writing in the week beforehand. For me, I have never been able to just sit there in the middle of the day and just begin writing. I’ve never been one to go to a cafe and start typing or bringing my journal in my bag and just waiting for inspiration to hit me. My writing hits me at the most inopportune times and I’ve kind of just accepted it at this point. There have been nights where I’ll lay in bed at 3 o’clock in the morning and I just have to turn my lamp back on, grab my journal, my favorite pen, and just start writing. I’ve been in classes that were two hours long of just lecturing and I’ll just open a new document and start typing because I had taken the professor before and they managed to give the exact same lecture the semester before. I’ve even been in the middle of writing a final paper for one of my classes and had to fight the urge to just save and quit to write about my latest characters because inspiration just happens to hit at the worst times. To be honest, it is quite annoying that my brain does that to me. It has lead to me being the biggest procrastinator in the world. It has lead to B papers that definitely could have been As if I had just taken the time to write it early and actually revise. The only time I’ve ever felt like my inspiration was hitting me at the right timewas when I participated in the Rhode Island Writing Project’s Open Air Institute, a professional development experience that forced me to actually write about ten times throughout the day and really start to explore my writing outside of deadlines and late night distractions. Following quick-write prompts throughout the day really pushed me to expand my writing past my characters and my school writing assignments. In comparison, my worst experience with writing had to be during my senior year of high school. I had a paper about Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that was notorious for being the hardest paper that we would have to write in my Honors English course. I, being me, waited until the night before to write the five to eight page literary analysis. Coincidentally, that very same night, One Direction’s next album Midnight Memories also got leaked online. Needless to say, I was pretty occupied with hearing my favorite band’s latest album five days before it was scheduled to be released.  I refused to write for hours that night, just staring at my ceiling, not knowing what Joseph Conrad  even remotely meant by writing “the horror, the horror.” My paper was due first period the next day at 7:35 in the morning. That night, I was up until six o’clock in the morning, crying over One Direction and my own stupidness at procrastinating so much over the paper (I got a B+ on it still so it was honestly not the worst thing I’ve ever written). I wish I could say that I have gotten over this habit of procrastination now that I have entered college, but I think it has unfortunately gotten even worse. As a writer, this had lead to me becoming so overwhelmed by deadlines, that I really lose sight of perfection in favor of the final product. And honestly, that is the most frustrating part of my writer identity.

#writing history

[writinghistory-445-blog]

Getting older meant that finding time to write was getting harder and harder. Writing at that point in my life, became something that was purely academic. To my fourteen year old self, if I wasn’t writing for school, then it was a waste of time. As a basketball player, I barely had enough time to sleep after six hours of school, two hours of practice, and then my eight hours of homework, much less keep up with this idea of being a “writer.” Plus, I was in the Honors track at my school and I pressured myself so badly into maintaining my top grades that I had developed severe anxiety that had paralyzed me from doing any sort of writing that was going to go towards a final grade. For a while, I had no idea how I would possibly keep up an identity as a writer. That was until I somehow joined my high school Writing Center. When I say “somehow,” what I really mean is that I had no intention of ever actually joining this club because I really had no idea what it was. Little did I know, that it would reignite my love for writing the same way that those Harry Potter books had. Basically, Writing Center is this club, of sorts, at my high school where students who excelled at writing would go in and mentor other students with their writing. However, to me, it turned into so much more than that. It was a community of people who shared a passion for writing and wanted to spread that love to others who struggled with their own writing. I had amazing teachers who acted as facilitators that encouraged all of us to journal and really build a community where we felt comfortable enough to be emotional and confident with one another. For instance, when I realized I could not handle the stress of both school and being apart of the high school basketball team, my teachers from Writing Center took me in. I sat crying on one of the old couches located inside of the room, as they surrounded me, patting my back and giving me coffee to drink from the teacher’s lounge. “Are you happy?” they would ask me. And after playing basketball for ten years and feeling pressured by my family to keep on the legacy that my older sister had started, I wasn’t happy and I felt like that was the only time anyone had really asked me that. An environment like that at fifteen and sixteen was exactly what I needed to start defining myself as a writer and also as a future educator.

#writing history

[writinghistory-445-blog]

Who can really talk about writing without at least discussing a bit of their reading history as well? In fact, I could tell you that the very first chapter book that I ever recall reading by myself was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the first grade and I was instantly obsessed, going on to read at least one more of the series every year, and even somehow managing to read them out of order. When the last book came out, I was eleven years old and unsure of where I was going to put the time that I had previously spent reading these books. There were a few questions that ran through my head at the time: Why did Harry Potter have to end? Why couldn’t J.K. Rowling just keep writing about Harry Potter? Doesn’t she know I want to know more about the next generation? The summer that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had come out, my Mimi and Papa, my maternal grandparents, had basically let my cousins and I stay with them at our family’s beach house for a few weeks, and it was basically the ultimate reading haven. I would spend hours on the front porch, curled up on the soft cushions of a lounge chair as my cousins ran around me or jumped over me. The breeze coming from the ocean was just enough to counteract the heat of the mid-July sun, as I squinted my eyes to try and read off of the brand new white paper of some new books that my mother had requested I try to get into. But, I was still infatuated with the idea of finding out more about what happened to my favorite characters from the Wizarding World as their children went off to start their own journeys. These same thoughts plagued my cousin Lee, who spent those summer days lounging right beside me. We would walk through the streets around our beach house, our flip-flops slapping the pavement, as we came up with a million and one conspiracy theories about the series. And then I had a single thought: What if I continued with J.K. Rowling’s legacy and just wrote my own series based off her characters? A brand new series called, Harry Potter: The Next Generation, just like countless television companies had done to keep rebooting their most well-received shows. And that is the story of how I accidentally wrote fanfiction at eleven years old without knowing that it was a phenomenon that had been located on the internet for years. But, Lee and I had an entire universe in our heads that we wanted nothing more than to contribute to. So, as our parents left us with our Mimi and Papa for two weeks during the summer, we ripped pages out of the back of an old notebook that my Mimi had left laying around with some important bill information, and began writing. We would stay awake until three o’clock in the morning, whispering to each other about our brand new ideas as the sound of the fog horn echoed loud and clear through our open windows. I don’t think I’ll ever forget having to explain to my Mimi why there were ink stains on my sheets after one night I had fallen asleep without capping the top of my pen. The experience itself lead to sleepless nights, but ones I would never forget. And I don’t mean to pat myself on the back, but the plotline of my first fanfiction was eerily similar to J.K. Rowling’s play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child that came out almost ten years later. We had only gotten a few chapters in before we quit because we couldn’t quite capture the essence of Harry Potter, but to be fair we were both eleven and I don’t think we were ready to write the next great American novel. To this day, my Mimi has kept the handwritten copies of my “novel” and claims how amazing it was that my cousin and I had the patience to just sit in beach chairs for hours, arguing about what characters should do next and write like our passion would never end. That was one of the best compliments my Mimi has ever given me and something I think really pushed me to start writing more regularly.

#writing history