Should Creativity Be Open Access?

Another kind comment from a student reader on one of the older biomes posts:

Thanks for posting this! It really helped me get some info for MY "Tropical Dry Forest Biome" project for biology class. I couldn't find any info at the library or on any other sites! So I thank goodness this was here....

You're welcome Haley! Keep up the blogging (and the blogging).

So why haven't I written any basics posts in a while? Well, to be honest, much of my time and energy in the past few months has been focused on getting a job in my field. I've recently had to pick up a few shifts doing catering locally just to pay the bills, which limits the amount of solid morning time I have to blog. As much baggage as I have with the food industry, it has always provided me with ample opportunities to make money.

What time I do have for writing during the day has been more and more focused on creative work. I don't think I've talked about it at all on here, but I have finally sat down and scheduled time to write a novel I've been talking about for years now. It's an intimidating task, and perhaps the worst torture known to man, but there is a certain feeling of release from the writing, something specific that science writing doesn't quite satisfy. Don't get me wrong, reading and writing about population dynamics and nutrient relations is special in its own way, but creative writing is so close to you that the act has a different impact, a different feeling of accomplishment.

I've never understood the fiction or poetry blogs, I suppose. I would never publish creative material free online. It's not about the money, it's about the credit and the lack of protection for the writer and her/his material.

When I write about science, I feel like the creative act has already been done by the researcher in crafting a novel experiment to divine a novel aspect of an interesting problem. When it's put through the ringer, the creativity is usually sucked out (necessarily) from a research paper. Science writers - especially journalists - must revive the novelty of the research and highlight the researcher's cleverness in such a way that it impresses the "layman"; this process requires talent and eloquence to be done effectively, and a great deal of creativity in structure, but it is not 100 percent yours.

Writing poetry or fiction requires an ample amount of you, especially since the story itself is always about some aspect of you and your life, even in the most obscure or alien settings. The creativity is direct, pure, and not only applied to bolstering the appeal and digestibility of the prose.

If someone comes to TVG and lifts a certain turn of phrase or structures a post of a different topic in a similar manner as mine I would hardly be as hurt as someone lifting a unique character attribute or a plot twist or even a strong metaphor to use in their own work. Blogs by nature tend to bend the rules regarding plagiarism, and an abstract copyright is just not enough for me to take a leap and turn a blog into my notebook for ideas and freewriting. Besides, it all seems a bit reality show to me.

I can see how the idea of such a notebook would be appealing, however. We're always looking for critics, for anyone to sit down a read a couple of paragraphs to see if the dialogue sounds believable here or if there's too little action in the opening few pages to draw a reader in. A well-trafficked blog would certainly generate more than enough responses and opinions without having to rely on whoever's closest at the time, but for me, that does not outweigh the danger of someone lifting your ideas wholesale.

The taiga has been on my "to-blog" list for a couple of months now. I should have a couple of basics posts up this coming week as life starts to normalize somewhat.