When to share and when to sit on your hands

I often think about this. When is it time to share your work? When does the need to share it become bigger than the risk? When is it the other way around? 

And then there’s, who do you share it with? Does whispering to one beloved lucky friend scratch the itch? Does the whole world need to know? Does having a bigger ‘audience’ make it easier or harder? 

Luckily the answer to every single question is, it depends. 

Sometimes I feel extremely bitter indeed about all the average writers who have a big audience. The people who join Substack and seven seconds later have 10K followers because they are inexplicably popular for having average opinions and a gregarious personality. (Someone I was infatuated with used to call me gregarious. I think it’s a horrible word. It feels brash and big and like much too much). But then I think about what happens once more people are listening. 

The biggest audience I ever had was for this piece. I like to say it blew up, went viral, got global recognition. I’m proud of it and I can’t believe how amazing my pony tail was. I wrote it last December and it came out in February, so for two months I felt like I was sitting on a lottery ticket. The night before it came out I barely slept, I woke up to go to Tesco before it was light, I took a video of my feet walking along the pavement (for a reel) and marched home with the paper under my arm. I’d been so scared that it wouldn’t be there, like they might cut it at the last minute and all my dreams would be over. And there were a lot of dreams pinned on it. In many ways all my wildest dreams came true: it went down with a bang, I got an agent after years of trying, I wrote a book proposal that made it out the door to publishers. But the dream stopped there and by June it was just something that almost happened.

Anyway I’ve written about that before and I will again I’m sure. When people like my work, they really like it. Sort of you get me or you don’t. The grammatical discrepancies won’t matter to you, nor will chaotically long or chaotically short sentences. An occasional misuse of a word won’t worry you and not always being entirely sure what I mean, will also be fine. Working with editors was an interesting process for me. For my aforementioned article, there wasn’t a dramatic change between my version and the version that made the print. Smoother edges, explained gaps, and every alteration my editor Ruth gave me, I could agree with. But when I read back my proposal I felt like the essence of me was sucked out. So maybe the problem was that she didn’t get it in the first place. And so, the thing we were selling to the publishers was a diluted version of me, and well, no one likes weak Ribena. If you’re looking for precision don’t look to me. 

But this whole process was interesting. From what I know, publishing a book isn’t a quick process. You have to spend a lot of time with the same words, making them better, setting them into stone. And this was my big dream, where I hung my hat, lay my sword, hill I’d die, etc and so forth. But I like writing something in a frenzy, pressing publish and sending it into the world. After I’ve sent something out I never read it back. Maybe once, later that day to marvel in my own perfection. But after that, it’s dust, it’s gone, it’s irrelevant. Like, I really would hate to be held accountable for any word I’ve written in the past. My utmost conviction turns to dust. 

A good example is how I was about to write a book about toxic yoga, and four months later I couldn’t care less about the yoga world. Like, that’s not my legacy and I have no further comments to make other than bitchy fleeting mumblings in a pub. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again because I found it to be a very complimentary thing to be said about me, but Tabby always says, ‘you’re a river person’ and readers, I really am. I got an email last week that was something about yoga and the look of puzzlement on my face, no comprendo ? 

So anyway, back to my point. It happens to work very well for me to be able to write often and send it to the world immediately and then let it go. It doesn’t all go into the world though. Some things are too much like raw dough. Maybe there is something in them, some essence, but it’s absolutely not right to send it out. When I had my big break up at 27, I started this word doc. I called it Tender little water dweller, because my horoscope began like that as we broke up. Hello auspicious sentimental timing. And I wrote in that document every day for six months. I have never read it back, I sent it once to a friend when she was in her own shattering breakup. But otherwise it was just notes. Notes on life. I’m fairly certain I wrote some melodramatic Instagram posts during that time that I should file away, but there was so much that can stay on the drive, forever. 

I think it’s important to make the space for this too. I wrote about my miscarriage last year but only six months afterwards when I could put some things into words. You can usually tell when you’re reading something that isn’t yet ready for the world. Too tender. And this isn’t to condemn over shares of my own in this lifetime or others. We find that out ourselves, quite quickly. And do that enough times and you learn, a sharp inhale of cold air isn’t always the medicine we needed. 

The reason I wanted to write this is because I think it all takes such a long time. To realise your dreams, to realise your dreams aren’t your dreams, to find the limits of it all, your own, the worlds. Maybe this is to say, you can have it forever, writing, writing things down and it can be many many things, but we can’t always decide what they will be.