You Can't Keep It All

This past evening, my co-author and I discussed his IP decisions and their effects on my long-term plans. As we talked, I re-visited in my mind why I was troubled by having "wasted my time."

Certainly no creative effort is a true waste, is it? Can't it be asserted that each time you create something, you add to yourself?

My grief over having to scrap my plans had to do with my goal. My goal had been to present what I had created to a wide audience, and now, that was off the table. So, from my point of view, his decision was a setback.

The new clarity about my work's IP issues showed me that I had not advanced toward the goal of any publishing/sale/distribution, and that was disappointing. But had I not advanced in any other way?

One reason I particularly disliked this turn of events is that some of the work I've done is unsalvageable. [For clarity: half of the situation I'm in now amounts to misunderstanding / poor communication between my friend and I, and the other half comes from my (poor) choice of source material. The bit of work I've done that is unsalvageable is directly related to the latter half.] As we assessed the situation, I realized that my displeasure revealed immaturity on my part.

Expecting to be able to use everything you make is immature. Fighting to protect ill-conceived work is equally so. If you checked out the link in my first post, then it's easy to see a major difference between me and a practiced author: she is mature enough to know when she's created something atrocious, and she throws it away. I am new at this pursuit, and I haven't learned to let go. The flat-out truth is, you can't keep it all, and you shouldn't want to.

I knew or suspected when I laid my plans and began work that I had made a less-than-ideal choice of source material. One method of preventing this kind of grief might be a "confidence check": if you feel confident about your plans (and you've attempted to head off any problems you can anticipate), it's probably okay to go ahead and start work. If you have doubts about what you've planned, then you're not ready to invest a lot of effort into creating - you need to re-visit the planning stage. Invest up front to save a headache later.