Editor’s note: Students in COMM 2311-601 Newswriting help write this story as a class, deciding what direct and indirect quotes to use and how to organize the material. These students include: Luisa Dosal, Giovanni Martinez, Saige Jolley, Michelle Moreno, and Tori Underwood. Several of the photographs are from students in COMM 1318 Photography 1.
What story do you see when you look at the series of six doors? Students in COMM 2339 Writing for Radio, TV and Film here at South Plains College recently had to answer that question as an assignment.
Why? At the end of the semester students must write a short screenplay. So early on they learn about various ways to come up with topics. One of the ways includes using a picture as an inspiration.
This semester students used “Mysterious Doors”, the series of six door photographs that were offered as writing prompts through The New York Times. The newspaper has offered these creative writing prompts to teachers for years.
Each student in the screenplay class had 30 minutes to choose one of the doors and write a story inspired by it.
Student Emma Pugh said she had trouble deciding which photo to use.
“It took me, like, a couple minutes before I was going back and forth,” she says, “because I couldn’t come up with the idea exactly because there’s so many possibilities.”
Ultimately, Pugh says she chose the photo that she says looked like a jungle or old ruined temple.
“It looked like it just like if I was like on an adventure and if I was exploring,” she says, “that’s something I would like come across.”
Pugh wrote a story about 23-year-old Marcus who leaves his front door to get on a ship that takes him on an adventure across the sea.
Mac Rodriquez says he chose his inspirational door in about 10 seconds.
“But all of these pictures were like little train stations in my head,” he says.
He wrote a story about the door with the laundry.
Rodriquez’s story gives the door life as a character, writing that the door understands life happens in small portions. The door, he wrote, trusts what is wet will dry, and good things happen when someone waits.
Student Keilah Oldaker says she wrote about the blue door with the flowers partly because it was pretty.
“And I’m like, it’d be interesting to see something so pretty,” she says, “and realize that something that lives inside of it probably isn’t all that good.”
Oldaker wrote a story about a woman named Vanessa who watches the door across the street every morning because she’s been told a “beast” lives behind it.
SPC English professor Nimi Finnigan says using photographs or other works of art is a creative writing technique called ekphrasis.
“It’s basically an actual writing technique used primarily in poetry,” she says, “but it’s applied to a bunch of different genres now where you take a visual piece of art, kind of like as an impetus, kind of like a starting point, to write a poem, a personal essay, and I think it extends to the screenplay as well.”
Finnigan says she’s been teaching creative writing for about 16 years now. Here at SPC, she says her students primarily write poetry or nonfiction. She says she used the same six “Mysterious Doors” photographs in her ENGL 2307 Creative Writing class this semester. For this exercise she says she allowed students to write whatever they wanted to write as long as it was inspired by one of the doors.
Two of her students, she says, wrote about the door with the dog.
Both students wrote opposite narratives about the same picture. One wrote the dog is sad and lonely. The other wrote the dog is tired but happy.
Throughout the semester Finnigan’s students take ekphrasis to a different level than the screenplay students do. Sometimes, she says they look at a picture similar to the doors. But sometimes it’s a statue. “And if it’s a statue,” she says, “I have them go touch it.”
Is ekphrasis a worthwhile creative writing technique?
Screenplay student Mist Coalson thinks so. “I think you can take any, any piece of media and go off of it,” she says, “whether it be a song or another show or a picture or a sculpture.”
Screenplay student Keilah Oldaker agrees. She says she took Finnigan’s creative writing class several semesters ago so she knows about the technique.
“And her talking about the taking a picture and having to write poetry on it,” she says, “that was extremely hard because we had to describe the sculpture or the painting without saying exactly what it was. And that was, yep, extremely difficult. But it works.”
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