Theme Essay by Martha Nichols
The Privacy Problem I Never Expected to Have
This spring, while visiting the Singapore Art Museum, I came across the striking conceptual work "Paper Room." It begins with a narrow corridor where every surface has been covered with crumpled manuscript pages.
A museum guard had to open an unmarked cabinet door to expose the corridor; otherwise, my son and I would have missed it. We walked through the crumpled pages of typescript to what looked like a blank wall. Then, after a sharp turn into darkness, we reached a tiny office with a gray-flowered couch, a desk strewn with more papers, stacks of books, and a typewriter. It could have been 1938, 1968, or some timeless writer’s dream.
Originally created in 2003, “Paper Room” is the work of a small collective of Singaporean artists called Vertical Submarine. (The hidden writer’s office is part of a second 2009 installation, “A View with a Room,” that’s connected to a more recent version of “Paper Room.”) The white-gray-and-black palette is subdued, meant to disturb. My ten-year-old son didn’t like the shadowy turn before the office.
Yet, I loved that private writing space. It felt protected among the webs of words. I loved that it was secret. All the crumpled pages didn’t seem lost to me, but necessary, a part of the creative process. And what struck me most was the messiness, such an apt representation of how the real work of writing gets done.
Not everyone likes piles of paper trash. Many of us, including my young son, prefer clean walls and bright lights and screens in which pages of words aren’t physical objects. But I know very well that my best writing comes from my own corridor of crumpled pages—and that I rarely generate the equivalent when I’m blogging.
Which means I have a strange new privacy problem, one that’s caught me by surprise.
In 2009, when I started my first blog, Athena’s Head, I confronted the usual privacy challenges. I worried that I’d get too personal. Insta-publishing felt so exhilarating that I feared I’d hurt a loved one with too many public disclosures. Danger! Writer Unleashed! (I even wrote a post at the time called “Blogging Ethics: When Do I Cross the Line?”)
I needn’t have worried. As a journalist and editor, I was well inoculated with privacy safeguards. Although it took awhile to work out the right boundaries for my blog, it’s been ages since I’ve agonized about revealing too much.
But these days, as I type away at a new blog called “Martha’s Singapore Column,” I’m troubled by what I’m not putting into words. In Asia, during a much-needed break from my normally hectic life, I haven’t felt compelled to keep a private journal or to do the creative writing I want to do. While I jot down occasional observations in a notebook, all my Singapore writing to date has appeared on the blog—in public.
Despite the daily writing practice it provides, something gets lost in the telling.
• • •
As a girl, I never felt drawn to the brass locks on diaries. I was an author who wanted readers. Still, I knew enough to lock away my messier rooms.
For decades, I’ve stockpiled private notebooks that contain all sorts of iffy observations, ideas for stories, and diatribes against the world. Until this trip to Singapore, I’ve routinely kept a journal about my experiences while traveling, and onto those paper pages, I’ve poured a river of forbidden feelings.
During my husband’s last sabbatical in 2004, for instance, when we spent five months in Nice, I was miserable at the start: ill with a sinus infection, wrangling a two-year-old, barely negotiating French, culture shocked. I did send a series of email updates to friends, and they included some of my difficulties—but in a highly edited, humorous form. After all, who wants to hear complaints about living in the South of France?
I saved the misery for my journal. Yet, the well-crafted email updates I sent are less evocative of that time period than the raw journal writing. Years later, I can still picture the yellow-ochre building outside our apartment, the swifts flitting past, my toddler son’s joy at riding the black horse on the nearby merry-go-round. I don’t just have photographs or neatly organized descriptions; I have images sharpened by strong emotions.
I came to love Nice, but I doubt I’d remember it so well if I hadn’t scribbled away in private, tossing off whole corridors of crumpled pages.
More important, my private observations have made their way into character and plot details in the fiction I’m working on. They’ve since leavened my assumptions when discussing other cultures. They’ve allowed me to reflect here about an experience that just seemed confusing when I was living through it.
• • •
In Singapore, almost a decade later, if I'm not keeping a private journal, I'm not recording what I edit out of my blog posts. At all. That includes anything messy that might reflect badly on me or that might become grist for later stories. So far, I've deleted much of the angst and everything that might seem self-indulgent.
Although blogging has helped me to tear down a few inner barriers, it’s also erected others. Blogging is far too driven by what potential readers think. Unlike the solitary experience of writing in my journal, I’m never truly alone on my blog. I’m always imagining a virtual audience, peering over my shoulder, telling me not to be foolish or craven.
Self-editing online happens quickly. With a touch of a key, I can delete whole sentences and paragraphs—pffft!—and there’s not even a crumpled ball of paper in the trash to indicate where they came from or went. The personal realm of blogging, which once felt so liberating to me, has now become another defense against internal messiness. I polish and shape. I clean up after myself too fast.
And, suddenly, private writing space feels as necessary to me as oxygen. I’m gasping for breath. I need to express reams of feelings, some contradictory, and none resolved in a sensible storyline. I’ve got to generate piles of words and jumbled sentences, thoughts that make no sense, false leaps of logic. I want to be heartlessly honest or dishonest or simply self-pitying instead of always enacting my even-keeled, online writing self.
I’ve started imagining fantastical private offices in abandoned attics, my childhood tree house, a cabin in the middle of a desert. I need to wallow in my mess without any witnesses. Living in cramped quarters with a ten-year-old (whom I long ago dubbed the “Little Chatterer”) and an extroverted husband—and my resulting crankiness—is not the stuff I want to share in blow-by-blow detail.
I could start a private blog just for me, doing my inner scribbling online. But blogging platforms, with their “Save Draft” and “Publish” buttons, their “like me” cadging, encourage sociability. The reality may be a single writer following herself, but the blogging ideal emphasizes readers, “traffic,” a constant audience.
One of the great virtues of online writing is certainly this sense of connectedness. The opportunity to be with others across the usual boundaries of time and space has warmed and nurtured my writing these last few years.
Yet, there’s a downside to the constant connectedness, too. If all the writing we do is a means to reach out to others, then solitude is harder to come by. It may even start to seem scary—a lonely, prickly dissonance that must be soothed or erased.
The void is what we fear, but facing it alone is what takes us to unknown destinations. Sometimes writing in a private journal seems to me like such a waste of time. All those rough words scrawled in secret, discarded in secret—those hours spent on sentences nobody will ever read.
Then I remember the hundreds of crumpled pages in “Paper Room.” It’s not a waste.
Publishing Information
- Vertical Submarine: As described on its website, this is "an independent art collective based in Singapore with three members—Joshua Yang, Justin Loke, and Fiona Koh (in the order of seniority) who paint a bit; write a bit; draw a bit; but eat, drink, and sleep a lot."
- "Paper Room" and "A View with a Room": Click on these links for peeks at these conceptual art projects by Vertical Submarine. The two projects currently appear at 8Q, the annex of the Singapore Art Museum. At the museum, "A View with a Room," which includes a 2009 version of "Paper Room," is described as a "work-within-a-work: an installation incorporated into another larger one that features [Vertical Submarine's] past work."
- Singapore Art Museum: Click on the link for more information about the museum.
- "Blogging Ethics: When Do I Cross the Line?" by Martha Nichols, Athena's Head (on Open Salon), January 12, 2010.
Art Information
- “Window Seat” © Sharon Mollerus; Creative Commons license
- “My Window” © Dave Morris; Creative Commons license
- “Room with a View” © Börkur Sigurbjörnsson; Creative Commons license
Martha Nichols is editor in chief of Talking Writing.
Since drafting this essay, Martha is happy to report that she's writing in a private journal again. She recently bought a new notebook bound in red leather, stamped with a chrysanthemum. It doesn't have a diary lock, but its elastic cord keeps the covers closed. She makes an entry most mornings.
Meanwhile, Martha continues to blog, but has cut down the pace. Follow her—in public—at Martha's Singapore Blog and Athena's Head.
