Importance of Keeping Your Work Close to Your Vest

It happens all the time...

A writer working on his or her first script, first novel, thinks it would a "great" idea to "share" it with a spouse, lover, child, friend, parent, co-worker or neighbor...

And the result is an unintended punch to the gut. The work stops right there. Enthusiasm and joy is replaced by doubts, second thoughts and eventually depression.

Why? Do our loved ones mean to harm us? Of course not.

Do they have an "ulterior motive" or a "sinister agenda"? Absolutely not.

But this is their problem -- they are NOT writers.

So they have no idea about the sensitive "mental and spiritual soup" in which our ideas and most precious creations ferment, multiply, and take shape as stories, scripts, articles and novels. It is a mysterious process, part "science" but mostly magic. That soup can be soured very easily by criticism while we are still adding crucial ingredients to it.

A lot of people think to give a "feedback" is to point out to the things that are missing. We all have that impulse to come across as "thoughtful" and usually the way we try to come across as thoughtful is to point out at what's "missing" or "wrong" with a project.

Even a casual and well-meaning comment like "I think that's been done before" is usually enough to dampen the spirits of a writer and mortgage her determination to press onward.

That's why I strongly recommend all my writer brothers and sisters not to show their hands too early, and not to ask their loved ones to read their stuff until it is 100% DONE. Only then they can read it if they please and enrich our work with their thoughful insights and learned suggestions.

But until then you have to protect your work just like a mother hen protects her chickens or a banker protects his vault.