What I Know vs. What I Don’t Know
4/15
Prompt: As Confucius (and Socrates) said “True wisdom is knowing what you don’t know”, this assignment is asking for the story of your personal search for information, as well as what you are learning about the topic in terms of what do you know vs what don’t you know.
Essential question: How can storytelling help me to examine the world around me?
When it comes to my essential question, there’s a lot I don’t know. Partially this is just the nature of essential questions: vague and open-ended, there’s lots of room for inquiry and little solid ground. My essential question explores how I can examine the world around me through storytelling. I can divide that into two parts: “examine the world around me” and “storytelling.”
What does it mean to examine the world around me? Which part? There is so much happening in my life and in the world around me. There’s my external experience; the state of the world, what’s happening to me and to groups I’m in, experiences that can be shared or observed. There’s also my internal experience, the innate highs and lows and of being a teenager, my relationships and my upbringing. Then there’s the experience of these things melding and clashing. There’s a virus ravaging the world and yanking the rug from under crucial parts of my youth. There’s seeing people devolve, lose the compasses we develop to navigate the world and tell us how to treat each other. There’s so many ticks where I am right now, and I hate ticks. I have a dog. I’m writing this next to a pair of tweezers and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. I am at war with ticks. Whatever I’m doing, if I look over and see a tick on my dog or the floor or, God forbid, me, I will stop to kill it. This sounds absurd, but frankly, hating ticks is a part of my life right now. Is that something I’m going to examine in my work? It makes sense: the world is scary and fighting the ticks invading my space makes me feel safer. I know lots of people who got Lyme disease and suffered mightily, so I have a rational fear of that too. But I don’t have room to unpack that as well as everything else that’s happening in the world and in my life. There’s one thing I know about the first part of my essential question: there is a root cause. Many of the big part of my life now boil down to instability, loss, and self-perception, and that’s what I can examine.
As for the second part, storytelling, what I don’t know is similar. Storytelling is broad and it is vague. It could mean fiction and it could mean autobiography. It’s not autobiography; I’m definitely writing a story of other people through which I can view myself and those around me. I have a very good reason for this. Oscar Wilde said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” I won’t be able to examine myself and my world if I’m trying to make the whole thing presentable. It’s human nature to paint oneself in a flattering light. Trying to avoid it is tricky; it’s hard to tell when you’re being fair to yourself. I’ve decided on a film format over a writing format because I’ve written before. Writing comes more easily to me, especially short pieces and poetry, and I wanted to challenge myself. Further, you get from poetry and writing what you put into it. It takes a conscious analyzing of self. I’m hoping that with a screenplay, I can be less deliberate. The sparser nature of it is not suited for purple prose, a bad habit of mine. It also gives me a chance to play with features you don’t have in writing, like music and clearer settings. The limitations are also new: no internal monologues, no writing what the characters feel or know; you have to learn to speak with looks and shots and music.