A dilemma which has inflicted me for the past ten years is which medium of expression I should use mainly. It sounds simple, but it isn't friendly to me at all, and I suffer the consequences occasionally.

Drawing and sketching have been my hobby and a favorite pass time since my elementary school days. When there's a pencile and a paper, I can't avoid do sketching on whatever is around me. It shows the my visual interpretation of the physical world.

After the period of voracious readings during the middle school days, I admired to write that kind of moving and powerful works myself. Since then, I keep diaries, journals and scrapbooks. When there's a pencil and a paper, I scribble and write. Scribbling is to jot down ideas and concepts before those escape my mind. Writing is to develop those concepts.

So always carrying a pencil and a notebook became an essential routine for me. After finding a place to sit down, I pull out a pencil and a notebook, and start either scribbling or writing depend on which is the best medium of expression at the time to catch the glimpse of my mind or surroundings. As I've been doing that for so long, I'm pretty good at it, and have developed my own style which gives quite an impression to others occasionally.

Am I an artist or a writer? Neither. First of all, I'm not making a living out it. Secondly although I'm pretty good at both writing and drawing, I can't get over that limit which marks between an achieved artist/writer and a hobbyst. To go beyond that limit, I need to concentrate on either writing or drawing, to see the world as a writer's viewpoint or artist's perspective. But doing both sketching and scribbling have been part of me for so long, I can't throw away one method for the other.

A pencil and a paper drawing has been artist's favorite tool for long time, but computer graphics is becoming a new tool for the future. I try to produce more computer generated graphics and that takes up quite amount of personal time, and that became half-hobby and half-profession; thus reducing time for pencil/paper writing and sketching.

As for the writings, most scribblings are like essays in nature. Being a professional, I need to write papers in technical nature.

While a professional artist develops his skills with a pencil and a paper all of his time; a computer graphics artist works only with computer to try out new medium nights after nights; a writer spends every seconds to pick the right words; a technical writer wrestles with correct terms all the time, I split my personal time doing four types of work in my limited personal time.

So it's obvious that I can't get over that limit, and I feel I need to force myself selecting only one of those methods as a medium of expression. Sketches and essays are piled up, but I can't find an effective way of sorting out to keep it handy for the reference; otherwise, those will end up as junks. After spending quite a portion of personal time, I don't want those becoming useless.

How about giving up writing and sketching? I'm frequently asked that if I'm not gonna make a living out of it and don't have an immediate plan to publish it, why bother to take so much time doing it in this busy and competitive world to survive. I say, it has been a habit and became a part of life writing and sketching. I can't get rid of it and doing it is daily routine like yawning, dozing, belching and so on, which doesn't look inevitable, but is really inevitable for the proper functioning. (Nov-27-97)