My Relationship to Process

(The following is an exercise from Nancy Slonim Aronie's Writing from the Heart: Tapping the Power of Your Inner Voice: Write about your relationship to process. Write about one thing you have [gotten better at] or would like to get better at. Make a contract with yourself: I ______ hereby agree to learn ______.)

It used to be that Process and I were hardly on speaking terms. I spent most of my time pining after the unattainable Perfect Product, with his designer shoes and his faux-diamond smile: it was as if I believed that if I just lay around hoping and moping long enough, he'd rescue me from my own insecurities about how to begin, and, once begun, how to continue.

At 13 or 14, I made myself a banner that read, “The Future depends on Today” – and, as I lay on my bed dreaming about everything I was going to accomplish, just as soon as I got up the oomph to get off my lazy butt and, say, start my homework, I would periodically glance at my banner and feel as though my future self were watching me and tsk-tsking. It wasn't until I was 19 or 20 that I finally figured out how the process of actually doing my schoolwork related to getting the grades I wanted.

I guess I'm a slow learner. Maybe it's not surprising that I'm still hashing out the process-product problem in the writing arena. It's only been very recently that I've shifted my attention from daydreaming about what it would be like to have written something worthwhile to actually doing some real writing.

I'm glad I'm no longer in the subjunctive with my writing process. I'm glad I have more of a handle on what it's like to Just Write.

However, writing anything more complicated than a blog entry continues to feel like a leap in the dark. My process is still largely a mystery to me. And I find it hard to “honor my process” when I'm not sure what it IS.

So far, I've been able to gather only that inspiration is available in many forms, most of which I am unable to access until I've done a certain amount of running around in circles.

What this means is that, as a writer, I'm just not going to be efficient. With more experience, I may be able to streamline the crazy contraption I'm currently using to get from Point A to Point B, but I suspect that trial and error are necessary components of any writer's process, mine included. I'm not real keen on error, so this is a real stretch for me. I just have to keep reminding myself that anything worth doing is worth doing badly – at least at first, at least some of the time.

So, here's the contract I'd like to make with myself: I, Tanya, agree to learn how to spend my writing time graciously and generously, without expecting that I will have “something to show” for my effort. I will learn to follow my intuition, even if that means changing my course and “throwing away” the time I already spent going in the wrong direction (if indeed there is such thing as a wrong direction – perhaps all wrong directions are really part of the right direction, necessary beginnings to an ending we wouldn't want to've reached any other way).