I haven’t been updating very frequently or at much length recently, but I have been busily writing and thinking and working on my own. Partly inspired by LM Montgomery’s (of Anne of Green Gables fame) delightful Emily of New Moon trilogy, and partly I guess as a natural outgrowth of my creative development in the past few months, I’ve started logging more time in my private art blog and less time here where the world can see. It’s funny that after so many years of putting myself out the public eye so very openly — and I’ve definitely became more and more comfortable with that — I’ve suddenly decided that I need some more space that’s just my own. But I think it’s a good thing. These days I find myself more secure and more ready in my acknowledgment of myself as an artist, so in that sense my creative identity becomes more public. At the same time, by keeping more of my private thoughts to myself, I’m able to hold on to more artistic integrity by protecting and honing my ideas until they’re ready for a larger audience. I guess it’s a bit like theater: the show wouldn’t be half so compelling if you also had to watch all the rehearsals and everything that goes on behind the scenes! Those are privileges reserved for the participants, and that’s rightly so.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been writing extensive Morning Pages every day, and not solely on the weekdays as was my habit before. I’ve also been logging writing time nearly every evening — both on my private art blog and in my actual paper journal — and to my surprise and pleasure, this has made my days so much richer and more contemplative. In the Emily books, Emily records in her diary her thoughts on pretty much everything, and I’ve been inspired to do the same. I used to do this in my middle-school and high-school days in a more OCD way, taking note of things like what we ate for dinner and exactly where we went shopping and things like that. Emily’s journal is much more thoughtful and curious; she writes about things she doesn’t understand, things that bother her, things that strike her that she wants to remember: just exactly what’s on her mind. This is what Morning Pages are for, but I think actually seeing such a journal in print — even if it’s a fictional one — has been a huge help. For years I’ve tended not to write about these food-for-thought things that fill the pages of Emily’s fictional journal, because I’ve felt like these things aren’t important. I hadn’t figured them out yet, or they didn’t lead to any particular finished idea, so they weren’t worth jotting down. But now I’m setting them to paper, and I can just feel my creative brain expanding hugely to encompass all these thoughts and ideas and wonderings.
It’s because of this very nature of these new jottings — that they are the things I haven’t figured out, or the things that seem at the moment like non sequiturs — that I don’t feel right sharing them with everyone else just yet. I’m not really comfortable with the entire world seeing me in a state of inchoate meditation — and I don’t think I should have to be — and so, by devoting more of my writing time to a journal that is totally private, I open up more of these previously-unrecorded realms of thought to my own mind. It feels good and right.
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 