I Thought I Understood Process, Until

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I thought I understood process. 

Process is the thing that gets things finished. It's the path you travel from idea to completed work. It's the steps you take and the way you take them. Ideally, you would enjoy this time of finishing, take pleasure in it, but whether you enjoyed it or not it was necessary.

At the beginning of January I pottered along the pedestrianised ex-railway line into Cheltenham and in through the automatic doors of the glass and concrete Wilson Museum & Art Gallery. 

I stood in front of a naturally dyed linen sheet onto which was projected a looping film of how the artist came to the finished pieces on the walls around me. It showed her digging clay out of a hillside with her hands, picking berries, juggling saucepans of boiling dye, digging a pit for raku firing. 

After doing all of that there is a frame of her carefully painting swatches of dye onto small squares of fabric and I thought “oh my god this is so much EFFORT”. I simply would not be bothered to do all of this to end up with some paintings and pots - just do the paintings and the pots!

And then I realised that this was, actually, process. It was creation.

I realised that all this time I had conflated process with time. For me, process was the time it took to finish something, and I was trying to think of ways to a) shorten that time as much as possible and also b) have that time be as easy as possible. I wanted to speed through to the result in something I thought was flow, which I thought simply meant that creation wouldn't feel like effort.

Stumbling out of the gallery I stood in a back alley and typed the following into my notes app:

"I have to get comfortable with sticking out the process, and the process taking time, and the process being the only way, rather than being eager to rush to the result (or the result feeling too hard won and not even starting). 

Process in spite of result.

Process is not progress."

The art had happened before the final piece was started. The art happened in the experiments, in the working out of materials and ideas, in the journey itself. The process of getting to a point of starting was the real act of creation, not the things I saw on the wall.

In the summer I started a novel, but before I started the novel I made an Excel spreadsheet with word count targets. For a month I wrote like mad to hit those word counts and I thought this was creating, but really I was trying to, very quickly, make the shape of a finished thing. 

Creating would have been to sit and think about the very first scene, to go to where it was taking place and smell the air, approach it from different angles, testing and testing and testing; writing different colour swatches to see which one better caught the light.

Maybe this isn't news for you. Maybe you're like, errr yeah? But it might just be cracking open everything for me.