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Secretive Art — October Memoir Challenge — 5 Comments

  1. Very thought-provoking, once again. Another reason I never talk about a work-in-progress is something I learned when I started writing. A writer is someone who has a story he/she HAS to tell. The story is a tension inside you that you have to express. You have to follow it, to see where it’ll go. So you sit down and start writing. But if you tell the story to someone, it’s out. You’ve told it. The need to write it is gone, or at least greatly lessened. Sometimes I can get away with describing it vaguely once to a fellow writer, as a sort of think-tank exercise, but if I went about telling it to a number of people, I just wouldn’t need to write it down any more.

  2. I create two kinds of art; hand knitted items and writing. When the knitting is a gift, it’s always kept secret (sometimes that’s hard when the giftee sits beside you on the couch in the evenings 😉 ). When the writing is a book, there’s often a period of time when your publisher wants things kept quiet; they like to control the flow of information and announcements according to their marketing schedule. Kind of like your suggestion that the timing of release is important.

  3. Very interesting. I used to work on a women’s magazine in Seattle. When I contributed art, I often preferred it to be anonymous. I considered creating a blog that was also written under a pen name, but I’ve decided to “come out” and just be me.

  4. Writing secrecy is different than painting or other physical art creation because those media are more quickly observed and often need a thick skin more than secrecy.

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