Reay Jespersen

A philosophy isn’t an easy thing to change. We grow up being taught certain things (intentional or otherwise), believing certain things, and have opinions formed by interactions with the people in the world around us and our experiences - things that are right and wrong, things that should or shouldn’t be, and why.

It has long been my philosophy that while I’m a creative idea man - I have notebooks full of them, for everything from stories and characters to settings and isolated independent scenes, inspired at times by anything and everything I experience and hear - the fact that I see precious few of those ideas through to completion, always writing something only to be distracted, crow-like, by the sparkle of a new idea, means that I should protect what relatively little I do finish.

Protect it from what? In short, theft. Which sounds exceptionally egotistic put so bluntly, but truly isn’t so. My concern has never been that of course people will steal my material because it’s clearly so damn good, but rather that I’ve been writing stories of various kinds literally since I could put two sentences together, and so with a lifetime of writing to my credit and with a passion to make even a modest living writing my own material, that it would kill me if someone somewhere took any of my material and presented it as their own and had success with it when I hadn’t.

Then several years ago I came across the website of a friend of a friend (whose name I unfortunately no longer recall, with some embarrassment), who regularly posted new short story material on her site. It blew me away, in part that someone could crank out fresh material that quickly, but more because she was just laying it out there for anyone and everyone to see and for anyone and everyone to take. I contacted her in that regard: here’s my baggage, and aren’t you similarly concerned about people taking your ideas and using it for themselves? Her response was that she has more than enough ideas to go around, and that what she posted was the tip of the iceberg of her completed material arsenal. Intriguing!

Years later, part of my wanting a website of my own was to accomplish the same feat: to not only write stuff, but post it. This was around the same time I started pitching some of the feature-length scripts I’d been working on, so it was part and parcel with not just finishing material, but trying to start getting some attention for it and for myself. And you can’t do that by sitting on a (slowly growing) pile of finished material and not telling anyone who had the ability to do something with it; to make something of it and, over time and with some luck, of you.

That first point of the website failed when I found myself still unable (ok, unwilling) to post my material online. Same old reason. Despite the big steps toward going public with my stuff, I couldn’t quite step over the threshold and actually do it.

A few years later, cutting now to a scant month or two ago, I read an interesting, brief article which cited someone - I believe Cory Doctorow - who stated that writers shouldn’t fear pirates of their work, but should instead fear anonymity. An interesting outlook which truly struck a chord with me.

Then this last week, I followed a link from Bubble Cow on Twitter which hit even closer to home. Seth Godin’s point in his excellent article on how to protect your ideas in a digital age is to not protect them at all, but in fact get them out there as much as possible. You aren’t going to be successful keeping ideas all to yourself, but may find success in making a name for yourself as someone with a lot of ideas.

In that light, and inspired in part by Twitter followee Alan Baxter constantly posting and hyping new material, and by new followee Simon Later’s infectious love of writing and posting about it, my philosophy is at least in the process of changing, with a huge part of that being my taking that step over that threshold I spoke of.

My next post will be the first time I’ve let the public see a story I’ve entered in contests but have shown to precious few; my first #flashfriday entry; the first time I’ve posted something I was hoping to save for future print publication. And hopefully, far from my last.