My Journey Through WRITING 160

       Coming into WRITING 160 for the first time, I had a very clear-cut understanding of writing. I had just come from an IB high school–one that had a somewhat strict formula and guidelines on what is considered literature, as well as how to go about writing (specifically literary analysis). In that setting, I was an adequate writer–I knew the formula well and had an arsenal of tools to equip to identify authorial choices across different forms of text, as well as the themes they contribute to.  I had always limited writing as a textual medium–in the form of plays, poems, novels, graphic novels, and scripts as a few examples, but never anything beyond those. Because of the intensive nature and the heavy focus on literary analysis at my high school (and especially how it compared to other schools), I had always believed IB writing to be the most effective form of analyzing a source text. Yet, I always felt like my writing was too formulaic–my essays were always quite similar (to the point that my teacher was able to identify one as mine without a name on it). Compared to my classmates, I had always felt my works paled in comparison, especially with how they were able to develop their own tone and flair in their works.

The concept of multimodal composition has been a term I’ve vaguely known, but have never really considered too deeply. The biggest concept that changed for me was constituting what was classified as writing. The writing process is far broader and can be attributed to numerous more things than I thought possible–even completely visual things, such as an animation or an art piece can be considered a multimodal text. In this sense, thinking of my skills and abilities as a writer was also broadened beyond my small world of IB literary analysis. Being in this class only further supported that–as I found myself creating game scripts, coding, and thinking of art compositions to depict different adaptations of source texts. I had always been a keen writer, but this class helped me reimagine writing to new contexts and think about how writing can be applied to various other contexts.

I think my best work is from Project #2 and Project #3. In Project #2, I developed a visual novel style game about the concept of grief and loss throughout generations through the lens of the series, Mo Dao Zu Shi. The overall process was intensive, but incredibly rewarding. I really struggled to try to adapt my essay from Project #1 into a narrative story format, but I genuinely think the end project did a good job of having a storyline whilst still including elements of literary analysis. I did end up having to cut back on the quality of art for the sake of time (I originally planned on redrawing the manhua panels of Mo Dao Zu Shi in my own style for art consistency and ensuring that the image quality wouldn’t be affected, however I was running out of time and had to use the original manhua panels instead). Despite this, I still feel like the overall mechanics of the game (finding parts of a panel to analyze and making choices on what that means) really do aid a personalized experience. If I could redo Project #2, I would spend a little more time adding in auditory ambience for different scenes to further aid in the development of different themes. In Project #3, I adapted a fanfiction of Mo Dao Zu Shi ("Reconciliation of Memory" by Zombubble) into a webtoon, following one of the side characters (Lan Sizhui) and the tension of opposites he faces in regards to his memories and what history tells him. I also really enjoyed this process and I felt that the visual symbolism I included within the panels was substantial to developing the themes present in the original story. In both Project #2 and Project #3, I would choose to redo the quality of the art (specifically to have more consistency in the coloring style of the art in Project #2, and work more with tonal values in Project #3). 

Overall beyond this course. I hope to continue to develop my writing skills, and spend more time evaluating my target audience for different writing works. A big part of multimodal composition from what I’ve learned (specifically in terms of translation and adaptations), is the concept of identifying who your target audience is (and how that may differ from the original work’s target audience). This class greatly helped me reframe my perspective to evaluate who exactly my works are directed towards, which help inform the development of other sectors of the writing process. I believe these skills are especially helpful in my personal and professional life, as finding styles of communication that best work for different people is an important skill to have in order to have effective communication. I think I want to improve my creative writing skills and work on developing more information-heavy texts into a creative writing format to appeal to more audiences.