These past few years of college have taught me nothing if not the importance of self-reflection and the power of perception. Although I have begun to perceive my writing and performing through a myriad of lenses, I can’t say I have had any epiphanies about where I am at (rather blissfully confused and ready for learning and experimentation). But I have realized that I hold the power to view my assignments and performances as failures, flops, signs of imminent failure, and/or I have the power to decide to view each event as a piece of a greater, serendipitous puzzle that will lead me down the path I am meant to go on (even if I don’t know where exactly that path will take me).

 

It’ the beauty of process.

 

I began researching and embracing process oriented work, incorporating the fundamental ideas of process in my everyday life and studies, after a 5-week workshop with Tony Award-winning Alum Gavin Creel called “The Process Project” that took place in the fall of 2016. As a self-proclaimed perfectionist, the idea of working for multiple weeks on an unfinished musical for no other reason than to work on it (no performance or finished product was planned to be presented) seemed completely unproductive to me at the beginning of the process. A self-proclaimed perfectionist, I didn’t understand all the in-between, the “play” that can occur before and during a rehearsal for a production, had to offer.

 

For as long as I remember, the aforementioned stick up my ass had given me a leg up in many situations. But for the first time this wasn’t true. In hyper-focusing on becoming the best performer I could be, I became obsessed with final performances and final drafts. I was paralyzed with the thought of failing, which drained me of happiness and limited my abilities to grow academically, creatively and socially.

 

Thanks to the happenings of “The Process Project”, I have begun to see the possibilities in each song I perform, in each assignment that I compose, and in any of the many paths my career may go down rather than the lack thereof.

 

Flash forward…

 

With a year of process-based ponderings slowly but surely changing my perceptions of my work and everyday life (which was met with much resistance on my part, thanks to old habits), I ended up joining the Sweetland Minor in Writing, just as the department reformatted their Gateway course. Throughout the semester, we were to take a piece of our writing, any origin, any format, and re-create it into three radically different pieces of writing: three experiments.

 

At first, I thought: well shit, that is a lot of writing! But, in true process-oriented fashion, these three experiments need not be fully realized. The whole idea of the course was to commit only to testing the waters in three different genres without the pressure of submitting an A+ project each time. I had no clue where I would end up or what I would end up with, similar to how I felt at the beginning of “The Process Project”. But this time, I jumped in.

 

My origin piece: a gushing journal entry reflecting on “The Process Project”.

 

The goal: Make my new-found appreciation for process oriented work, particularly in the arts, important to others.

 

I began with a multi-modal piece with the idea of practicality in mind; any writing career these days would have to accommodate a multi-faceted digital format. I am a huge consumer of digital media and writing, and enjoyed toying with the idea of creating my own “Humans of New York” style blog that focused on other performing artists and storytellers. I was upset that I didn’t have the time to fully realize this experiment; I was looking forward to showcasing and picking the brains of peers whom I admire so much. But at the same time, I realized how challenging it would be to create a functioning digital platform with photos, interviews, and text. I always thought respectable writers had to have some sort of prestigious degree and write for a respected publication a la The New York Times, but I understand now that, while these writers are worthy of immense respect, individuals who compose writing and content for new media with and without degrees are just as impressive. (And shout-out to the accessibility of self-publishing via the internet!)

 

My second experiment was a Playbill inspired article that showcased the actual 5-week workshop- “The Process Project”- spear headed by Gavin Creel at the University of Michigan in the Fall of 2016. The material we worked on in those formative five weeks is now in the process (ha) of becoming a full-fledged musical written by Gavin and directed by one of my favorite professors, Linda Goodrich, in New York (check out my sketch draft for more info on Loud Nite). As an avid reader of Playbill, the genre of the uniquely short and to-the-point, multi-media articles was one that I was extremely familiar with. I went ahead and made my sketch draft a replica of what I thought this article might look like, pullin’ all the stops out compared to the bare bones sketch draft I created for my first experiment.

 

The decision on the second experiment was made, again, with practicality in mind: writing for Playbill would be the happiest of marriages between my major and minor, and of two of my favorite pastimes. It is evident that my concern during the first half of the semester was still to make this writing minor as practical as possible for my future and potential career choices. Looking back, I don’t think I realized that I was neglecting to take my own advice on “process-oriented work”.

 

All of which led me to my third and final experiment: the personal narrative essay. My goal was to fight the tropes and clichés of what a “personal narrative” was, as the genre had recently taken the internet by storm with several jarringly uncomfortable stories that seemed to have more shock value than literary merit (apologies for the shade here…). Because I think some of my favorite writing could be classified under the personal narrative genre (i.e. the works of Joan Didion, Cheryl Strayed, etc.). I gravitate to the vulnerability in a personal narrative, the openness, the weight of reality in each individual story.

 

But soon after deciding on the genre, my research unveiled the broadness of what could be considered a “personal narrative”. So I turned to the rhetorical situation: audience, context, and me. After a few meetings and ramblings with my lovely writing professor, a woman of the theatre like myself (a true blessing in disguise for the beginning of my journey in the writing minor), I decided to form my own personal narrative into a blog series for the online platform called HowlRound. Before this, I had never treated my writing with urgency. But writing for this half-academic journal half-blog helped me find more clarity in purpose in presenting my own story. I learned to balance my go-to conversational tone with one of immediate relevancy and importance. I did not second guess what I had to say, instead I tried to find the most effective and authentic way to say it.

 

Reflecting on the process of writing about process oriented work in three radically different genres (oh, the irony), I have even more appreciation for what happens in-between inception and creation. Although the genres for my first two experiments were chosen with career in mind, I didn’t feel the usual pressure to get them right, which still accompanies and plagues many of my singing and acting performances. I allowed myself to test the limits of my own imagination, to break the walls that I had built around myself, unknowingly, about what my writing should be and what good writing was, and I enjoyed every step of the way. Hopefully this will continue as I learn more about myself as a writer and a performer.