Post 1: Composing

Like most writing processes, mine is extremely messy. I often have a hard time getting what is in my brain into a coherent enough form to write about. I make haphazard notes, write things out of order, and skip the introduction altogether. Usually, I have to verbally talk through my ideas, especially if the content is something I’m unfamiliar with or threads I’m grasping at weaving together. Once the ideas are there, I write as much as I can with little worry about flow and organization.

My first draft is always atrocious. I print it out and go through it by hand, marking it up like crazy. I draw arrows, I cross sentences out, and I write new ones. And finally, I create a draft that I am (usually) proud of.

The multimodal text I created to show the process mentioned above from the beginning: the spark(s) of thought in my brain. The process was almost therapeutic in a way, and although my first thought was how am I ever going to create something that shows this, I went with my first instinct. Because I used a whiteboard like surface, I did not necessarily feel restrained by the materials as I was able to show the spark of an idea as well as the revision process. The integration of the printed pages was to show how the ideas merge from my brain (the white board) to a printed page after much thought. Because verbally talking about my ideas is not always a step I take, I didn’t represent it here. However, had I used a different format I may have incorporated this.

The verbal aspect of this process is a lot messier for me than I described above. It often takes me several attempts at explanation to get the ideas from brain speak form to human-to-human form. Because of this, I think the creative angle I took worked better for me than both linguistic or oral communication would have. I incorporated the music (which is from an rpg music site: https://tabletopaudio.com/) as a means to hopefully show the delight that can come from ideas sparking. I am very happy with what I made; it turned out a lot better than I thought it would.