Sometimes when you have an idea for something, a concept, and you share it, people will think it is the final product. Hard lesson learned? Don’t share outside your circle of trusted idea bouncers until you are done, done, done.
You see, if I have this great idea for a story, but it’s not completely fleshed out yet, there are my peers I can take it to and bounce ideas off of, and there are the other people who work in my field I cannot.
Not that I can’t trust them with the idea, I usually can. It’s more that they may decide that the rough idea is the best that I can do.
If my idea is pretty well thought out already, they may think I am done with it when I am not.
Then maybe they want to use it. Right now!
But perhaps they didn’t fully understand what I was doing, and when I give it to them, they aren’t getting the whole thing, in fact, they may be getting even less than the original idea they heard. Just an outline with nothing properly filled in.
In that kind of a situation, I may never get the chance to fix it, and it will go out to the world like that: a vague outline that everyone thinks could have been better.
Even if I get the chance to try realize what I originally envisioned, it is already partially out of my hands, and the results can be sketchy.
Sometimes that’s good enough. But deep down inside, I will never be happy with it. It will never have been what I wanted it to be, even if it turns out all right, I will still feel like I wasn’t done with it.
Be careful with what you are doing. Everyone knows you should always put your best foot forward. Not everyone realizes that when you ask the cobbler which is your best foot, he may shoe it for you without realizing you were only asking a question….