How Much Thread Can I Share Before I Quit Spinning?

Recently, I joined several colleagues for a day of listening, talking, and thinking about writing. We were privileged to hear an outstanding researcher offer her insights and impressions of the more recent trends in student composition. Many things she said were noteworthy. I jotted quotes on my session program, I made comments on the handout, and I thought about using the inside cover of a publisher's copy of "They Say, I Say." It never came to that, although it would have been ironic if it had.

One of the more thought-provoking comments that our speaker made was that students growing up in the age of the internet are much more likely to see texts--any texts, written, spoken, sung--as part of a great commons of intellectual thought to be added to and borrowed from at will with little, if any, credit given to sources.

She used the metaphor of a weaver as he takes a little of this material and a little of that to weave a fabric of story or thought together. In the students' minds, the finished product belongs to no one and everyone.

It all sounded so warm somehow, all that wool, one big blanket, covering so many people. Then I remembered the last time the temperature dropped unexpectedly overnight. A blanket that was always shared was suddenly spoken of over breakfast with copious personal pronouns.

And I thought about the days of Chaucer, when writers wrote, and printers, storytellers, and book sellers reaped the profits.

As a writer of both fiction and critical essays, I began to wonder how many words I would be willing to share before I started using personal pronouns to describe my writing, backed up with copyright certificates from the United States Government.

When writers began to receive just compensation for their efforts and toils, all of us were rewarded with more stories, more entertainment, and more world-changing thought. If the reverse happens, if music downloads are free and photographs can be reproduced with no regard for ownership, I'll still tell my stories. But I might not write them down.