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This tip I learned from smarter writers will gain you the following you dream of.
Wednesday I was talking with a friend about work. I told him how a project I’d hoped would come together quite nicely before the end of the year hadn’t, or at least hadn’t fully. The project will take time. I’ll have to keep tweaking it.
“So, it sounds like it’s a process and not a product,” he said.
“What?”
He said that in his experience creative projects aren’t really done even when they’re “done”: story published, podcast aired, script delivered. Instead each project exists on a continuum. This is the work that represents what I’m capable of now, but I will return to the ambition or idea that inspired the work in another project. And I will then improve upon what I’ve done here.
It’s all process, he said. No product is ever really produced.
“Woah,” I said.
My friend Wright Thompson once got somewhat similar advice from an editor, Jay Lovinger, a legend in longform and magazine publishing. Lovinger said the best writers are the ones who come to realize that publishing great stories is not the point. The point is to use the stories as the means to improve. The stories are vehicles to challenge yourself and…
