Drawing the Chicken 20: On Process over Product
(and a sneak peek into a new poetry workshop I'm developing)
I just got back from a whirlwind trip to an incredible part of the country, teaching a 3 day poetry workshop in the gorgeous Arunachali countryside. I have been there before, exactly 5 years ago, to do a similar workshop, and my calendar was honestly already groaning under the weight of too many other commitments this year, but this is all part of how I’m preparing for the upcoming adoption by the end of next year— savouring travel, and whimsy, and even too much busyness, before it all gets a lot more complicated next year!
The workshop posed an interesting question. For the first time in my teaching, I was asked to teach towards an immediate final product — by the end of three days, the students were expected to have a couple of poems written, edited, and ready for publication. Now, my own creative process is far slower: I will sit with a poem or an idea for weeks, sometimes for years, making notes, writing a few lines, coming back to edit the poem, over and over, before it ever sees the light of day. It’s one of the reasons why I could never be an Instagram poet— that’s a skill of its own, but I could never put work out with that kind of speed and regularity. We managed to work with the constraint, though: The whole thing about being a poet is that you learn to find artificial constraints interesting, and even a source of creative energy (see my post about Working with Limitations here).
At any rate, the students got some poems written, and I got thinking about our ongoing collective obsession with creative product. It isn’t one college or festival; a quick glance at writing workshops being advertised on Instagram would suggest that a lot more people want to have written than to write (I recently even saw ads for a workshop that will teach you how to complete and market your novel without ever writing a sentence — AI, I suppose! As my friend Akhil Katyal says toh mat likho yaar. If you hate writing so much, then don’t write, there are far more effective ways to make money!)
Even for folks who are still writing their own books, I suppose that the internet has made publishing easier than ever, for better and for worse. The better is that there are fewer gatekeepers, and a lot more folks, especially from marginalised communities, can have their voices heard. The worse is that it has pushed us collectively into the pressure to create, publish, market, keep building creative identities (turns out I’ve already said quite a bit about this as well last year in Slowness in an Age of Instant — I promise I’m not actually trying to plug my Substack in my Substack, the thoughts are just all interconnected!). Where creatives used to work in the shadows for years, now there is a very real pressure to have something to show for it on at least a monthly basis— or more like twice a week if you actually want the algorithms to keep up with your art. And maybe I’m somehow already old-fashioned before I’m even properly middle-aged, but I cannot get behind it.
I come to writing, art, creativity in general, for process. The product is a happy accident, but it’s not why I create, and it never will be the most important part of my creative journeys. I love what creativity adds to our lives. I love my poems as the places where I get to tell my deepest truths, where I get to play, where I get to notice my own inner worlds. I love the non-fiction book I’m writing because it has taken me deep into so many powerful stories and layered worlds, and because it is now forcing me to think new thoughts about what I’m writing about, offering me new frameworks for my own experiences. I love my pottery because it lets me step out of the overly cerebral nature of the rest of my life, lets my mind and creative energy follow my body and its movements, grounds me in the basic elements of earth, water, air and fire. All of my most vital reasons for creating have nothing to do with the final product.
As we speak, I am also wrapping up a diploma in Narrative Therapy. For my final project, I’m developing a 6 month poetry workshop that combines poetic craft with a lot of the slower, deeper, life transforming processes that narrative work offers me. I want to support folks not just in writing better crafted poems but in writing poems that will change the poets’ lives — because how else will they change anyone else’s? I know what a tall order that is, but that’s the exciting part for me, the part for which I write. We will absolutely also work on technique, even on how to put together a book of poetry, but my goal, always and always, will be Process over Product. I hope, even in the age of instant productification, I can get enough others to come along for this ride. We’ll find out!
Thank you for this, Aditi. So many takeaways here. For someone who is a very slow creator, who agonises and doubts for months over a piece, who rarely sends her work out, this is a much-needed validation. Enjoying, loving the process and staying in the realm of creation is the best gift this accidental meandering into the world of writing has given me. And I'm lucky to have mentors like you 💖
It's a long-term relationship, yes! Like most things, people, I love, there's always a fair amount of regret, bitterness, and shame too. But it never diminishes any of that urgency or agency. Moments when I let go of trying to hold on I find my footing again with a new piece of work. So much better for our mental health as writers for it to be emphasised that we'll never lost our ability to make. It's just an incubation period sometimes, and that's it's own journey too