Jenny Paprocki

Cannon
ECI 307
22 September 2016

I was never good with words. While I could see them, understand them, and form the
strokes with a pen needed to put them on paper, I could never quite find the right order for them.
Even as a child, I couldnt grasp the skill. I couldnt write the intricate loops of the letters, and I
struggled to read the sentences those loops created. The sounds these words were supposed to
make escaped my capabilities. As I got older I soon learned to grow an appreciation for the
written word. I could see the beauty in the poised placement, of the flourishing flow, of the
hidden meaning behind each sentence. Writers like Emerson, Poe, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, they all
swarmed into my head with their ease of placing the words in the right place. They were
confident in their placement, they were sure of their stories, or so they seemed to the sixteen year
old girl I once was.

I wanted to be that. I wanted the ability to compose a story that captured love and
happiness and heartbreak and anger. I wanted the power to put down the beautiful thoughts in my
young, yet naive, head onto paper. But the ability wasnt so easy to grasp. I was frustrated. I
couldnt find a way to translate my inner thoughts and make them external, at least not in a way I
was proud of. The stories stayed clustered in the endless abyss that was my mind. Id try to
encapture the way the green leaves of that tree Id see outside my bedroom room would sway
and rustle against the window screen, the way they allowed specks of sun rays to shimmer
through their crevices in the early hours of a sleepy morning. All that appeared on my crisp white

pages was a cluster of sentences lacking the elegance I desired them to all have; the words were
empty meanings on an empty page.

I was in high school, a junior, and I slowly discovered my love for literature. I began to
appreciate the classics and novels that were presented to me. I encouraged the love between
Daisy and Gatsby, cried when Okonkwo killed his adopted son, sat in shock as the life of Guy
Montague slowly left the pages of the book. As these stories developed page after page, my love
for literature followed along. I craved to discover more stories, more adventures, more
characters. I craved to become a better reader and a better writer, to become as brilliant as the
authors before me.

My desire to be good with words seemed to evade me for years after my new found
appreciation for literature. I lacked the support from home that I craved. My daddy wasnt a
writer, he was an engineer, and my mamma never went to college, writing was never important
to them. Their priorities were consumed in things other than my desire to encapture scintillating
stories. Id try in my English classes, junior year and onward, to produce my own writing that
could describe the beauty of the world, but it was never something that could be classified as a
piece of art. If only I could express in writing the sound of the scratching of my pink childhood
bike as it slid across the newly paved tar asphalt, me painfully trailing along, but try as I might,
the abyss continued to take my cluster fuck of a story into its arms. I wanted my work to be
simplistic, but engaging, meaningful but jovial, clear and vivid. I had this idea in my head of
what writing should be, not what it could be, and that was my problem. Writing should cultivate
its readers, it should make emotions soar and question the world we live it; It should be As I lay

Dying, Araby, Barn Burning, The Great Gatsby, but never could I create the same language as
the books I idolized.

I soon strayed from my adventures of writing the worlds next best seller. I was burnt out
and frustrated from all my failed attempts to put my thoughts into phrases. I took up photography
instead. I needed a means to express the images and storylines behind my eyelids that never
stopped showing. I took that need to create a story into creating a story through a photograph.
With my measly Canon camera, slowly the photographs became more and more complex. I used
different people, different settings. I explored abandoned houses, Raleigh and New York, The
Appalachian mountains, Wrightsville beach, and used different sceneries in different pictures.
The pictures began to speak for themselves, their stories unraveling after each snap of the shutter.
The picture of the young girl with curly sandy hair, surrounded by overgrown vines in an alley of
abandoned trailers spoke in the terms I always desired, just not with actual sentences. It spoke of
emptiness and loss, abandonment and adventure into the unknown - the forgotten. Each
photograph captured a feeling within me, which soon became my salvation in my pursuit of
writing.

I began writing down the thoughts and atmosphere of the photographs I had taken. They
each conveyed different stories in my older, yet still naive, head. My use of words still wasnt
great, and still is not to this day, but Ive come to realize nothing has to be perfect. Nothing had
to flow, and rhyme, and nothing necessarily needed a deeper meaning. Sometimes my stories had
no meaning; they were just words on paper and that is perfectly okay.

I became more confident in my abilities; I learned the difference between false

expectations of being my idols and the reality of being myself. I became my own writer. One
who was influenced by Faulkner, Emerson, Poe, and Fitzgerald, and I realized I wasnt them. I
was me. Regardless of what I did, I would never be them, because my writing is my own and
mine alone.