Week 5 of being creative

Writing + comic + you're welcome in my garden 🌱!

Day 1+2: wrote the Week 3+4 update

Day 3→7: comic.

I needed collaboration to push past my creative constipation. So I hit up my friend Yufei because I like the way she sees the world through drawings. We’d stopped in random parks to sketch plants, and I felt time slowing down in those moments.

We started by picking the same poem to draw from.

She found this poem by a Chinese kid, Bi Zixuan, whose parents are out working in the city. I was resonating with it big time because I’ve been feeling very homesick recently.

In fact, just the night before she sent me this poem, I sketched that I feel like a transplant:

In my homesickness, I was grasping for a self-identity to feel less lost in my post-grad life. Much like a transplant barely having any roots, I don’t feel grounded at all. Having been thrown to define my path 100% for the first time, I’m eager to fall back to what was to define what is. Yet, my childhood and Vietnamese home started to become something foreign. I no longer think primarily in Vietnamese, to the point even words from a Vietnamese movie surprised me. The transplant is wobbly right now.

So when Yufei sent over the poem, I had a clear synopsis

We spent a few days working on a storyboard

By the time I finished, I was concerned if my interpretation was too literal, if it wasn’t creative enough. But workshopping my ideas with her was one of the most creatively fulfilling things I’ve ever done. When I got stuck, she would ask me “What did you feel from this sentence?” “What would be the color or texture of that feeling?” None of my answers make any actual logical sense, but it felt like the most genuine expressions I’ve had in months. When words failed in helping me understand myself at all, metaphors were the perfect transmitter.

And vice versa, I asked her what was her first thought/ interpretation when she first read this piece. “Does it have anything to do with your mother?” =)) was how Freudian we got.

By the end of our session, I worried much less about the technicality and the “edginess” of my ideas, but more about the feelings I want to convey and what tools can this medium, colors and light, can I use.

So here’s the end result:

Am I just homesick or do I have mommy issues?

Day 6: Dance audition

I applied to be a dancer in this theatrical piece. I got passed the screening round and went for an audition. It was another collaborative creative experience that I really enjoyed. The director/ songwriter handed me the song and asked me to dance to the theme of the song - isolation. She threw prompts at me as I freestyle, asking me to dance as if I was trying to be perfect but failing to be so, to do more floor work, and to use my body and props to make sounds that would convey such emotions.

I was nervous, of course, as this is on a more profesh end than I’m used to. I’m nowhere near pro and also in a phase where I judge myself a lot. But by the end, when I just breathed and looked at myself in the mirror, a strange sense of silence and nakedness and honesty drew over. It was fun. I don’t have the video for it and it’s one of the more experimental artsy things for sure. But I’m glad I put myself out there for the audition to even happen.

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Takeaways

1. Keeping the 1-hour-a-day commitment was important. I’ve noticed that I feel more alive on days I do those 1-hour creative work in the morning than on days I skipped. I made this no-word playlist for these sesh and sit in my backyard soaking in the sun while drawing. This + meditation with Ha can ground me for a whole day.

2. I’ve been thinking about whether I should dedicate more time to learning those crafts vs just making things. For example, I have a drawing course. Now making 2 comics has sparked my interest to invest in actually going through the whole course. But would it be a stray from me actually creating vs just my perfectionism/ hoarding knowledge tendency telling me to procrastinate? How do I balance this? I could spend time outside of this 1 hour each day to learn, but that seems like a commitment that might break this whole thing given my full-time job and how tired I often feel after it.

   Please let me know if you have thoughts/ suggestions on this topic.

3. Following up on #2, I start to have a desire to dig deeper into each project than just a one-time small piece. I’m thinking of writing a series or making a drawing series.

4. More collaboration suggestions are welcomed.

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This is the week #5 update of my daily creative challenge, as outlined in the Re-manifesto of this blog. I’m inspired by MỞ - Mơ và Hỏi’s course, Writing On The Net 2 (#wotn2), and all my friends who write and create consistently!