Wednesday, September 24, 2014

One Year of Letters

A shameless plug for my newest project: One Year of Letters with my co-authors: Elaina Portugal, Colleen Aune, and Mary Knuckles.

Each week we'll write letters to ourselves, seeking to change the very essence of who we are by facing our challenges and working through our traumas. We hope to find stronger, more authentic women on the other side, but I have no doubt that in the process we'll find hope and courage.

Join us on our journey! If you wrote yourself a letter about this week, about the challenges facing you and how you were going to work through them, what would you say? Say it at One Year of Letters

Friday, September 5, 2014

Idea Thief

As a writer, I have ten ideas a day. One of those is good enough for me to write about, maybe two or three. Out of those, one in one hundred is good enough, broad enough, clear enough to start developing a novel out of. I tell people all OVER the place about ideas I have. No one has ever stolen anything. Have they been inspired to write a similar story? Yes. Have I read a story of another person and said to myself, "I can write that better," yes. Are the stories in any way "the same"? No.

I can write the "same" story I wrote ten years ago, and it will be totally different now. Because my life is different now. Different things resonate with me now. Different things resonate with different people.

I had a friend whose father complained that people stole his ideas. He loved to think up stuff and tinker with stuff. But he never got a patent. Not a single one. So guess what? They didn't "steal" his ideas. They ran with an idea for which he was not willing to put in the work.

Same goes for writing. Unless you wrote it up and started producing it, then no one "stole" your idea. You were just helping them brainstorm. You have to do the work or it doesn't belong to you. And ideas, they're like opinions; they aren't real. They aren't tangible. Now, write it down and it becomes intellectual property. But just think about it, converse about it, ponder it? It's nothing.

On a further note, the anthropic principle of ideas: if an idea is borne of someone else, if they are the ones who breathe life into it and turn it into something which others can experience, then the idea belongs to them. Just by virtue of the fact that THEY gave it life. Next time you have one of those ideas, breathe life into it instead of tossing it around in the air like cash at a strip club, or stuffing into some dark cellar like some dirty secret that will probably get you arrested. Treat it like the royal, beautiful thing it is or else LET IT GO, and move onto something you could do better than anyone else in the whole world.