Most people I know think they’re going to be robbed. They put locks on their doors, carry valuables close to them, they’re always on high alert. But you can’t store an idea behind a locked door. An idea behind a locked door isn’t that useful. If the idea isn’t shared, then perhaps it never existed in the first place.
I once asked a famous architect whether they were scared of being copied. Once they designed that new fancy chair or kettle, what would stop someone taking those designs and just copying them, flooding the market with cheap reproductions and diluting his work?
He responded in two parts:
Firstly, he said the people who are interested in his ideas, aren’t interested in the reproductions of them. The people that buy his objects, aren’t interested in the chair or the kettle, they’re interested in the story behind it. They want an original. If they’re the sort of person who buys a reproduction, they were never his customer in the first place.
Secondly, he said that by the time the copies would have been manufactured, he’s already moved on to something new. By the time the cheap knock-offs hit the market, it’s an old idea, and so they’re worth far less then something new from him. He said, “I dare them to just try and catch me.”
This architect knew that it wasn’t the object that was the valuable bit, it was his honed ability to think differently from everyone else. To spend time and energy interpreting the world, and re-inventing it. Over and over again. That’s what his buyers bought. The chair or the kettle was secondary, very secondary.
Often, when new writers approach me to illustrate their work they’ll ask me to sign a non-disclosure agreement before they share their manuscript. And I get it, they want to protect their idea. If a ‘professional’ saw this idea and thought it was great, they could just steal it and pass it off as their own, right? But what new writers don’t realise is that’s a great problem to have. If you’ve got an idea that people want to steal and make their own, your on to something. But, if you can’t have another, and then another, and then another, like the architect I talked about, then you’re not a writer. You’re just a person who had an idea. You’re exposed.
Until writers realise that the words on the page aren’t the important bit, it’s difficult to make progress. If you’re scared that this is the only idea you’ll ever have, you tend to protect it with your life so you don’t share it, which means it’s hard to get feedback. If you can’t get feedback, you can’t improve it, so the idea dies.
But, if in sharing your idea, someone copies your first one, then you know it was good. Someone liked it. And if you’ve got ten others waiting in the wings, then you’re on to something. It’s going to be very hard for anyone to catch you too, when you’re writing like this, because you’ve already left them behind.