It’s not easy to do that kind of self-analysis, but I think you nailed it.

I can still remember — vividly — sitting in my sixth-grade class and having the idea for Jurrassic Park drop into my head. It wasn’t called that, of course, but the idea was there — pow! Get DNA for a dinosaur and grow your own!

Original? Hardly. Did Crichton steal from me? Of course not. Could I have used the money? Oh, man….could I have used the money.

To quote (and paraphrase) Hemingway:

“Every writer needs a built-in bullshit detector.”

I think you have a good one.

Yes! And amen! It’s what Uncle Ben said, “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

@Will: The audience can’t choose an option they’re not given, and I think you nailed it with “pursue a better venue than this particular street.”

I should also add that this is a perfect example of “Do as I say, not as I do.” Change the idea in question, and I could have written this post myself several times over the past several years. Touhg lessons, indeed.

Now, of course, what I’m thinking is that I should reduce the scope of the project until it more closely equals the return I can expect. But there are only so many hours in the day that I can spend tap dancing in the street (I say, inspired by your post, Moriah), and while I don’t intend to give up the tap dancing, I may pursue a better venue than this particular street. The fact that a celebrity got applauded for tap dancing in the same spot doesn’t mean I was wrong to leave it.

There are a lot of factors that go into the audience’s judgment, right? And if the audience is the judge, then whose choice is obscurity? No one person’s alone.

More seriously, I think you’re definitely hitting on a creative class zeitgeist with this post. Once upon a time, writers, musicians, journalists, etc. focused most of their energy on figuring out how to jam their foot in the door of whoever was in control of their industry. It wasn’t exactly fair, and I think we’re realizing that more and more. It seems like every day there’s someone who was basically ignored (or would have been ignored) by the top dogs in their industry – and who’s suddenly found success by marketing themselves online. But it was a lot simpler in many ways because there was only that one road to success.

We’ve been given a lot more choice and power to make our own roads. But I find that a lot of creative people, myself included, are absolute dunces when it comes to promoting themselves. It’s just such a different skill set. And there’s this old world thinking that persists, telling us that our work should speak for itself. Well, the sad fact is that along with all this newfound power to publish ourselves, we now have the responsibility of convincing people we’re worth listening to. The good news is that everyone’s in the same boat. Big media is having just as tough a time trying to figure it all out. The bad news is that since no one really knows what’s going on, we all have to figure it out on our own.

I wouldn’t call that cheap.

By the way, you haven’t responded yet to my invoice. I’ll send another. Duct taped to a Kodiak bear.

– c.

At the end of the day, obscurity is a choice.

Some part of your work will make it out though. That’s a win, right?