The Awful Truth About Authorship

A recent reader's comment brought up this very important and seldom discussed topic.

Authorship (for those of you who might call it something else) is simply the idea that your ideas belong to you because you created them. (It may be over-simplifying, but you get the general idea). Not in a legal way (copyright belongs to you the moment you finish a piece) but in an ideological way.

For example, I once wrote a piece of poetry about my relationship with a family member and the first person who read it said, "Wow, this is exactly like my relationship with my father." Now, not to sound crass, but I definitely wasn't thinking about her or her father when it wrote it.     

Which brings me to my point. As long as you keep your work to yourself, you have complete control of authorship. You can change it however you want, shift ideas and themes, etc. But the moment you allow others to read it, especially a large group of other people, you lose some of that.

This is simply because everyone else who reads your work is viewing it through a different filter. Whatever you've created has gone through your lens. Your life experience, your thought process. But the same thing happens when someone reads it, and suddenly your ideas are being interpreted by their brains.

At first, this can be really frustrating. My inital reaction was "No, I didn't mean it like that. It's supposed to be about blah blah blah." It could be a metaphor about the decentralization of Eastern Europe but the reader just sees a story about vampires.

But I would encourage all the writers and authors out there to also see the humor in it. It can be just as fun to see what different people draw from your work. Sometimes their reactions surprise and delight you. Sometimes they see things you never imagined, and it can even be inspirational. (Of course, if that happens always act like you totally meant it like that and you're just that good.)

Either way, good or bad, recognize that before you let everyone else see your work, you're letting go of a bit of  control. Once the characters and the plots are out there, they no longer completely belong to you. They belong to everyone. And for writers and authors, that can be very hard. We have absolute control over everything until we let other people read it. It can be very personally upsetting, because we put ourselves into our work.

But it's sort of like growing up. Once you do it, you're all the freer for it.
Topics: Writing , Author , Novel , Self-Editing , Authorship , Control