There’s something rather odd, really, about making a decision to share private material in public. It’s a process which is attended with questions like ‘why would anyone care?’, ‘but what if people are mean about it?’ and of course ‘what if people think I’m a raving narcissist?’
These are all quite possible of course and perhaps, with what I currently have in mind, even probable: what I’m currently considering is publishing my composition notebooks online.
Perhaps some context is needed. My notebooks pretty much ARE my creative life. Those of you who visit here often, or follow me on various forms of social media, may already be aware that for the past 6 months I’ve been creating video blogs of my composition work – regular updates where I talk about what I’ve been working on and how pieces are developing. Just about everything I talk about in the vlog episodes started out in the notebooks. It’s where I make notes of peculiar ideas, develop my thinking around those ideas, build them up with notes on things I’ve read or listened to or watched, paste in photographs or screensnaps of related image-based work, and generally develop my thinking. It’s also where just about everything in my professional life gets noted – meetings with Bastard Assignments, meetings with website clients, lists of library books I want to check out, lists of what I’m reading and listening to, great long rambles about how I’m tired and stressed and don’t have a clue what I’m doing. Everything.
I write a lot in these books – normally I go through one 250-page notebook about every 2-3 months, although this current book I’ve had for 3 weeks and am already 115 pages in… So we’re talking about serious volume here.
At this point, perhaps we need to address that last question above: ‘So, Caitlin, are you in fact a raving narcissist?’
Erm… no, I really don’t think so. The idea behind this plan isn’t that I think I’m so very special everyone’s going to want to read everything I ever wrote. It isn’t that I think this stuff needs to be preserved for posterity. Instead, the purpose is transparency of process and to see what effect this private-work-in-public might have on how I work, the quality of work produced perhaps, how I feel about my work, where my own boundaries are, and other questions that are being raised as my PhD research investigates the line between public and private.
Something I really need to work out though as I try to fathom how to go about this, is the question of redaction. I feel quite strongly that as little as possible should be removed from the books – too much editing and the whole enterprise would lose its purpose. But it’s a tricky line to tread – where do you stop? At what point does discomfort with openness become actual redaction? I feel there needs to be solid, objectively constructed rules so that mere embarrassment doesn’t decide whether something is hidden.
At the moment, the key to redacted content seems to be to protect the people in my life who are a significant influence on my work (Bastard Assignments and my supervisors, for a start). I’m considering obscuring or perhaps coding names, and I’m considering a blanket rule to remove the notes I take in my supervision meetings because I’d rather my often quite scrappy note-taking didn’t have the chance to reflect negatively on my supervisors. Most of the things raised in these meetings end up being discussed in other forms afterwards as I get around to looking at them in detail, so nothing of consequence should be lost as regards process.
After the question of content comes that of logistics. And much of that will rest on what level of engagement with the content should be facilitated – the setup to just allow browsing of pages is much less complex than that which would allow, say, viewing of all content relating to a particular piece or topic. And of course, the whole system has to be able to be streamlined enough that I’m not spending hours and hours and hours redacting and categorising content which may – realistically – never actually be looked at!
Are you aware of other creative artists who routinely post their working notes online? Do you have any suggestions for software or approaches I might consider? I’d love to hear them!