Process over outcome

Craft as an adventure

“How would you feel differently about your craft if you viewed it as a noble adventure?”

I stopped reading BODY OF WORK by Pamela Slim long enough to take a quick note. “Craft as an adventure,” I wrote, expecting my future self to understand.

Naturally, she didn’t.

I do this a lot, especially while reading nonfiction. Something will tickle my brain — a line, a turn of phrase, an unnecessarily abstract concept. I write it down, because that’s what writers do, they observe and take notes and shuffle through those notes on a semi-regular basis. My columns and micro-essays often begin as an item in a “Notes and Ideas” database in Notion.

I screenshotted the line in case my future self needed a little more context, then filed it away for later.

In BODY OF WORK, Slim equates “an intense devotion to your craft” to “going on a hair-raising adventure.” You slay dragons. You explore foreign lands and encounter new people. Sometimes you even fall in love. It is, at its core, a fundamentally different approach to making art, where you focus less on the outcome and more on the journey.

I identified deeply with what Slim was saying. The past two years have been a crash course in prioritizing process over outcome.

Like all industries, publishing is obsessed with the final product. Drafting a novel. Completing revisions. Holding a book in your hands, a book you wrote, a book you bled and wept for. Which makes sense! Of course we want to focus on the tangible results of our work! But there are downsides to focusing on the outcome.

My goal was to finish revisions by the end of the year. It felt like a thoroughly manageable goal at the outset. But my latest round of betas have opened my eyes to all the ways I could improve the manuscript. I could stick to the original plan of querying by 2023. I could! Or I could take the time to make TSATS the best it could possibly be.

The outcome gremlin in me chafes at the thought of discarding my timeline. I want to finish this book! I want to tell everyone in my network that I revised and queried two books in three years, because apparently that’s the mark of a truly great writer (?). I want to be able to check this one thing off my list.

Brianna Albers 🐝 @briehalbers

writing is so much more enjoyable when you accept that things will take as long as they take! because ultimately you want your book to be the best version of itself, which takes blood and sweat and tears and time

Brianna Albers 🐝 @briehalbers

writing is so much more enjoyable when you keep your eyes on your own paper

“When you choose the adventure of your craft,” Slim writes, “you find unexpected, beautiful, and unlikely twists and turns that you never expected.”

I wasn’t expecting this detour. If I’m perfectly honest, I’m actually a little miffed — how dare my manuscript not be perfect from the get-go! But the fact remains that I could make something exceptional if I heed the call of adventure. I probably won’t finish by the end of the year. But I will have made something with a life of its own, a story that morphs and grows and is constantly seeking the height of vitality.

I want that for my book. Hell, I want that for my life.

So I’m settling in for revisions that will probably take longer than I planned. Every day is an adventure. What does this story have in store for me? What about this character, this scene, this sentence?

A spell for October: Bless the process as much as — if not more than — the outcome.