There's a quote about writing that's like "I hate writing, but I love having written," and it used to get shared around a lot as haha funny relatable. But nowadays I don't relate to it at all. I think it's actually not good to hate the process of creating or find it constantly distressing or frustrating, and that was considered normal, and maybe it was or is, but it doesn't HAVE to be that way.
as someone who wrote several novels as a teenager, I luckily made a lot of fundamental discoveries about writing at a relatively early age, and the importance of genuinely enjoying the process was one of them.
I had projects where I had a really clear vision of what I wanted the final thing to look like, and I never finished those projects. Writing projects I actually finished were always the ones where I started with NO plan and just fucked around until I reached the end.
I am figuring out more and more that I am a pantser (as opposed to a plotter)-- someone who writes "by the seat of their pants" so to speak, and though this post isn't exactly about process in that way, this post made it click for me what that means. The result of my process is not the purpose of the process. The process is its own thing. The way I like to write and puzzle through stories and figure them out as I go isn't like, an auxiliary thing that leads to a desirable product, it is the thing itself.
I've started to think about all art in terms of being performance art, not in the sense that there is an audience watching, the opposite actually, but in the sense that the process of making it is part of the art. Making IS art, or art IS making.
So when I write, when I am in the process of writing, I'm not working towards something that will be art. The art is already there, in the essence of what I'm doing.
