Sharing can inform your work

One benefit of sharing works in progress is you can a read on how people receive it. It can be hard to tell which of the things you’ve made are good, but sharing can provide some valuable feedback.¹ I experienced this when sharing the first verse of “Seeking a Friend in LA” on my IG story.

! [[ One who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions ]]

Many songwriters also like to perform a song for others before deciding to record it. Jeff Tweedy, in How to Write One Song, says it can be a simple as playing it for one person, and often the act of performing it in front of another can inform what to do next with the song.

Austin Kleon says that many of his ideas started out as tweets, which then became blog posts, which then became book chapters.²