I have embarked on another book project. I will tell you more when all the contracts have been signed and Ms Winfrey gives me the OK.
But one of the notions in the book is that sharing ideas in public is both useful in improving those ideas and a good way of getting ideas back. Declare that you're interested in something and people are wonderfully inclined to say 'hey, I've seen something related to that’. This is good.
It’s a bit like this. There are some people it's easy to buy gifts for. Those people have clear, defined interests. "I like owls!” And so their house is full of stuffed owls bought for them by nieces and grandchildren. Ideally of course they have more than one interest. Because there is such a thing as too many owls.
But if you don't declare an interest you risk getting nothing. Or bath salts. Or people leap on the one tiny clue you give them and pummel it to death. One Christmas our son was very keen on the TV show The Walking Dead. So he ended up with Walking Dead posters. Walking Dead apparel, mugs, everything. It became known as the Zombie Christmas and is a useful warning from history.
So I'm going to share some of the writing process on here. I’m going to declare some interests.
There’ll be drafts of bits and pieces and perhaps some tales from the wordface. And I'm going to experiment with turning comments on for these posts. So if you want to join in please feel free. I suspect traffic is now so low that there won't be a big spam issue but we'll see. Posts will be tagged DI for reasons that will become clear when Mr Yentob signs the relevant releases.
Things that seem related to the topic of sharing ideas in public include:
Clive Thompson’s thought about the value of blogging: “Even if I was publishing it to no one, it’s just the threat of an audience”
And there’s that thing from (I think) the FT (which I can’t find now) about
But the thing I keep thinking about is from Hedda Sterne "The Surrealists tried to be agonistic, bizarre. I wasn’t like that. I didn’t think I had the kind of mind and power of thinking to change the world. I had a very great urgency to show, to share. The cat brings you in things, you know? It was that kind of thing. I discovered things and wanted to share them."
And of course there's all the writing and thinking that Matt Webb has been doing recently about Writing As Thinking/As A Generative Act. Which is related but not quite the same.
There's also something to be explored here about sharing ideas without exposing yourself. Not a thing that we worried about so much during Privileged Blogging 1.0 but which needs to be thought about now.