Too little
Withholding the encounter
I will show it only to someone who understands it exactly as I do.
The desired certainty keeps the work from being shared.
Nonpossessiveness
You painted waves. Your visitor has found a dance.
Readiness to relinquish unnecessary claims of ownership or control.
Nonpossessiveness lets a work enter another person’s experience without requiring that experience to reproduce your own. You can make deliberate choices and explain them, then remain interested in what a reader or viewer finds. Authorship carries responsibility for what you offer; it does not give you complete direction over every response.
Nonpossessiveness gives a work with room to meet another life
You put down the brush beside your painting of blue curves. A friend begins a small dancing gesture: the shapes remind them of bodies turning. You had been thinking about waves. Instead of immediately correcting them, you ask which movement they noticed and look again. The sea has not been evicted from the picture. It has acquired a visitor who hears a rhythm you had not named.
Finding the balance in Nonpossessiveness
An illustrative everyday situation
Allow a viewer to make a personal response without requiring your intended interpretation.
A fitting response
Room for response
I saw waves; tell me about the movement you found.
Your intention and the viewer’s experience can both be considered.
Pursued too far
Erasing your intention
Whatever anyone says must be what I meant.
Receptiveness becomes a denial of your actual choices.
You can offer an intention without supervising every encounter with it.
When the situation changes
A response makes a factual claim about a real person depicted in the work. You can clarify what the work does and does not say. Making room for interpretation does not require accepting false allegations.
What Nonpossessiveness makes possible
A viewer may find an association that enlarges your sense of the piece. You may also learn where you want to be clearer. Nonpossessiveness makes these exchanges possible without turning each one into a contest for the final authorized feeling.
Nonpossessiveness in ordinary life
A story’s favorite character
Let a reader care most about a character you expected to be secondary. Ask what made that figure vivid.
A performance revisited
A musician hears a different mood in a phrase. Explore the response while keeping the agreed boundaries of the collaboration.
Nearby virtues, different work
Open-Mindedness
Open-Mindedness considers whether an alternative could shape the work. Nonpossessiveness allows a response even when you do not adopt it.
Generosity
Generosity offers a contribution. Nonpossessiveness releases the demand that the recipient use it to reflect your importance.
Nonpossessiveness and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: The required response
Demanding gratitude or one correct feeling is a counterfeit of Nonpossessiveness when described as artistic openness. It still tries to own the encounter.
Counterfeit: Authorship abandoned
Pretending you made no choices can resemble Nonpossessiveness. Genuine openness can stand beside a clear account of your intention.
How to cultivate Nonpossessiveness
Explain your intention briefly when it helps.
Ask what the other person actually noticed.
Let a harmless different association remain different without forcing agreement.
Try it today
Openness to response does not waive credit, consent, privacy or agreed use of the work. Those are separate matters from a viewer’s personal interpretation.
Share a suitable work with a willing person and ask what it brings to mind. Listen before explaining your intention. You can clarify a factual misunderstanding while leaving their personal association room to stand.
In a diplomatic conversation
Let the work meet responses you do not direct.
Questions worth returning to
Which response am I trying to require?
What becomes possible if I listen before correcting?
Keep the practice proportionate
Openness to response does not waive credit, consent, privacy or agreed use of the work. Those are separate matters from a viewer’s personal interpretation.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
The writer has the chance to stumble, by the way, on something pleasing, something interesting, something encouraging, were it only to a single reader.
Stevenson describes effects a writer may not have planned. A work can find a real use in a reader’s life that its maker did not direct.
I do not know that you learn a lesson; you need not—Mill did not—agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast.
Stevenson describes reading Wordsworth. A reader can receive something valuable without adopting the poet’s beliefs or reproducing his intended lesson.
she could laugh at her poor little book, yet believe in it still,
After the first sting of contradictory reviews, Jo recovers affection for her book. Allowing it a public life need not mean disowning it or accepting every verdict.
Jo wrote her little stories, and sent them away to make friends for themselves and her,
Louisa May Alcott · Little Women · CHAPTER FORTY-TWO ALL ALONE · English original · excerpt
The narrator gives Jo’s stories lives of their own among readers. Sharing a work lets relationships form beyond the maker’s supervision.
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays · THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. · Edna H. L. Turpin edition, 1907 · excerpt
Emerson gives readers an active role in meaning. Once shared, a work meets imaginations that bring their own experience to it.
a competent reader often discovers in other men’s writings other perfections than the author himself either intended or perceived, a richer sense and more quaint expression.
Montaigne describes the part chance and readers play in art. A response beyond the maker’s intention may disclose a real strength in the work.
the principal point is never to disturb them in looking at what interests them, and never to make them look at what does not.
Ruskin is advising adults accompanying young visitors in galleries. The wider paragraph prescribes his own canon, but this local instruction allows a viewer’s actual interest room to develop.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the fourteen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. Begin with a piece you want to make.