Journey
With such broad topic to interpret, I wasn’t sure where to even begin. But all journeys have to start somewhere.
I decided to recall projects I had completed in the past, thinking about how I started them. Almost every time, I began with brainstorming, usually in the form of a spider diagram. If given a topic, I would write down everything to do with that topic, which is what I have done here.
Once I had my spider diagram in front of me, I looked through it for words/subjects that I felt drawn to or that have a lot of room for exploration. For me, some of these were:
- Getting Lost
- Psychological
- Permanent change
- Experience vs Destination/Accomplishment
- Fiction – Journey of a character
I like the idea of getting lost or something not going as planned on a journey because it shows that you can’t plan everything in life and will have to adapt to unanticipated situations. Getting lost can also turn into a journey of its own. It can be terrifying to lose your way at night in a city or on a dangerous hiking trail, but it can also be fun or enjoyable under the right circumstances. Losing your way in a forest, for example, and finding a river you’ve never come across before, or being lost with a group of friends and laughing about it. You can lose your way in a metaphorical sense too, whether it be a change of heart about a career, questioning who you are as a person, or going through a traumatic event. I feel like there is a lot to explore here.
There is also the element of the reason for the journey compared to the journey itself that interests me. Sometimes, the experiences you have along the way change you so much that you don’t want to strive for the goal that you originally set out for. Sometimes the end goal wasn’t what you expected it to be, or wasn’t worth the struggle. You could be permanently changed from it, whether it be a physical injury that never goes away, or being impacted mentally. Either way, going into a journey and coming out of it forever changed is another element I’d like to explore.
This is where character journeys come in. A character usually goes through some kind of change over the course of the story. They aren’t the same person at the end of the narrative as they were at the beginning. I love that you can see the choices they made along the way that shaped the end result of who they become. Some of my favourite works of fiction involve physical journeys too, like quests in fantasy or sci-fi.
I am excited about having so much variety within this topic and I’m looking forward to exploring it more deeply through different disciplines of art.