I hope you'll all forgive me, but I'm just going to jump right into this.
As a writer it is occassionally pretty helpful to get other people's opinions on something you've written, an idea you've thought of, etc. Not to mention it can be rather fun and exciting to tell people about your latest idea, show them your latest bit of prose, etc. But I'm always rather worried, considering how important my writing is to me, that pieces of prose or ideas will be stolen by other people. Now when it's just a paragraph, that doesn't bother me too much. But when it's a chapter or, especially, an idea or set of ideas that bothers me tremendously. It bothers me to the point that I have mostly stopped saying anything specific about my writing to anyone, even when I think that would be helpful and even to people I've known for a long time in real life (especially since they're usually writers themselves).
So I was wondering, does anyone else have this problem? And if you do, do you know of any way to get passed it? Such as some sort of legal safeguard which will protect the copyright of whatever you say? A contract that another person can sign if necessary?