Topics as Photographs :: Writing

Writers are like photographers, Donald Murray reminds us. The photographer doesnt snap a picture while scanning an entire scene. Instead he selects a single focus (239-240).This analogy was exceptionally powerful to me. The idea of looking through a camera lens out at an government issue or a topic just has wonderful possibilities. You could do a panoramic photo, including the wide picture, seeing how umteen pieces fit together. On the other hand, you could function the high-powered zoom lens to get up close and magnify a single element of the photo. Even the photographers finis to exercising black and white or color film to make a particular statement can translate into a writers decision to use sparse exposition or flowery prose to create a desired effect. A question that occurs to me that I might ask my students is this If your topic was a photograph, what would it look like? Would it have lots of characters in it, or just one? Is the physical setting the most important eleme nt, or rather the reflectivity on the subjects face? And on and on.Maybe this speaks to me because I am the yearbook editor, and one of the biggest jobs of the publications staff is to find the right picture to assort the story. From an entire role of film, we might get just one or two functional photos or none. Or we might have so many to choose from that we have to select the best angle and/or composition. Those words, angle and composition are writing words as well as optic arts terms. Out of a notebook full of drafts, I might find the same dilemmas -- not enough or too much usable raw material for a piece of writing.