Giving it Away

I write Facebook statuses when I ought to write blog posts.  My little nuggets of snark and brilliance (Snilliance?  Brark?) are usually wrung out responding to a political picture or a photograph of a friend diligently consuming an entire box of crayons.  I hadn’t considered this until I read a facebook status concerning the origins of Christmas traditions. Here's the transcript from the Thought-o-matic 4000:

I love Chritmas!

This is a cool academically minded person, I should join the discussion

I don’t really care where the traditions come from, but I do like the traditions

What traditions do I like?

*typing* I'm interested in holidays and traditions from an academic point of view, but usually the things that are most important to me are important because of the effect they have had on my personal life.  The reindeer and evergreen wreaths and bright halogen Christmas lights and Christmas Eve church service singing the alto line of "Silent Night" with my mother are the reasons that I-

At this point, the conductor on my train of thought threw the e-break (yes, that makes sense, quiet you).  I was noticing a few things about my status comment.  A) this is kind of ridiculously long, and B) this is the exact same process I use when I write a post.  In fact, my first instinct when I thought of that was to write a facebook status about how I never write blog posts.

Let’s back up before the Inception jokes begin.

I’ve been blessed to take a creative writing course with Pearls this semester.  She’s a wonderful lady, with a bachelors of creative writing out of New York, a head full of poetry and images, and the delightful inability to stay on task.  Her class has become something of an English major self-help group, with students derailing conversation into the terrifying abyss of their future and asking how we can become marketable to hiring agencies.  Pearls has done wonders to massage away the tensions of unworthiness and defeatism that inflict of the liberal arts major in all of us.

During one such self-help session, a girl in my class asked about when she should share her work.  The idea was alien to me: I was likely to blurt out my thoughts or concepts full SECONDS after they had occurred to me.  This strange young girl was waiting weeks, even months before even mentioning to those closest to her.

Pearls response shocked me further: wait until you publish to share it.  In her eyes, the best time for your family to discover that you had written a novel was by spewing fairly traded coffee onto the cover and upsetting the shop cat when they found it in a used bookstore, five years later.  I had always thought that sharing and collaborating were natural parts of the creative process.  But here was Pearls’, Goddess of the Written Word, descended upon me from the holiest realms of New York and tenure, telling me that this was the last thing that I should do.

I was enraged by this.  Well, maybe not enraged, but "mildly put off" seemed like a pathetic way to start a paragraph.  What was the goal of writing, if not to share with an audience?  Text was, after all, a form of communication, and communication cannot exist without both a speaker and a listener (you could argue that the speaker can also act as the listener, but we already chased out the half-formed Inception jokes with a ratty old broom, so let’s not go there).  Even my little facebook statuses, my half-formed novels, and my rotten poetry existed for the sake of sharing an idea with someone else. 

Thankfully, Pearls mended her advice: you HAVE to share your writing with someone, eventually (excepting truly personal works, diaries, etc, etc, you contrary people need to just calm down).  Pearls shared a story about a man that was so overly protective of his work that he never managed to fulfill his dream of being published because he was afraid of the editing his publishers would do.  “There is a time and a place to share your work,” she said, “but hold onto it for a while for God’s sake.  Take your time.  Let your ideas grow a little before you ask someone for their opinions.

That’s when it dawned on me.  The facebook statuses and snarled masses of notes that I call my “novels” were all only babies.  Newly hatched chicks, slimy and covered in bits of calcified exowomb, unable to open their bulbous creepy eyes to take in the world for themselves.  My ideas had hardly developed and yet I was thrusting them, squalling in terror, to my friends and family, asking them all how they would shape this concept, stoke the fires of life.  My ideas hadn’t had any time with me, to hold them close and play with them, to see the strange new directions they might turn.  Many had the potential to grow and fly, but I had to nurture them first.  Give them time, let them stretch their wings.

So next time I have the impulse to write a facebook status, I’ll have to ask myself why I’m writing it.  Am I sharing a frivolous tidbit for other’s enjoyment?  Or am I casting the seeds of my imagination, malformed and premature, for the entire world to see?