Writing As Process and Goal

Allison Armijo // Blog Writer

I remember when I was in elementary school, writing minorly fleshed-out stories on cardstock paper in crayon. I had control over the story; I could decide what my characters did, who they were, and where they ended up. From then on, I fell in love with the power of storytelling, jumping from one story to the next, not worrying about what I had done in the past or what I was going to do in the future. When I first started writing, I didn’t fantasize about the stories I would write; I just wrote the first thing that came to my mind.  

As I progressed through middle and high school, I loved watching interviews between librarians or professors and authors. I loved listening to podcasts about the process of writing and rewriting until a big break manifests itself on the page. And I loved entertaining the idea of taking a Masterclass to finally learn that one secret to writing my best-selling novel. I still love that stuff; it is what made me choose to go to school for creative writing. It makes me feel proud to be a writer, proud to be someone who loves the process of writing and the community it inspires. 

Being someone who romanticized the writing process from childhood to college, I found it difficult to make the distinction between writing as a process and writing as a goal, especially as the idea of writing as a career became much more realistic. This was, until I listened to a panel of authors discuss their path to write and publish their first novels. 

Neither author set out writing a novel with the intention of being published. They talked instead about how they started writing because they wanted to write something, and this passion for the process of writing grew into an accumulation of words on the page, which eventually was sent to an agent, which was then sent to a publisher and accepted. This isn’t romantic; it is recycled, but also admirable. 

It made me realize how disconnected I was from the process in its entirety. Caught up in expectation, writing became something that I centered around the idea of production, as in how much could I write in this allotted amount of time? Would I be proud of the work? Where could I submit or publish it when it was done?

Going to school for writing is different than wanting to be a writer when you’re in middle school. It is much more technical, as one might expect, and imposes a certain architecture on your writing that can help you, or make you feel creatively stifled. 

While I am still in love with writing, I am forced to confront what about it I find enjoyable every time I try to put ideas on the page. Especially having multiple outlets to publish my writing on, I see myself in different ways, different styles, that I never anticipated myself fitting into. The language surrounding how I write has changed; I do not romanticize who I want to be as a writer because I am learning more about myself and what I like to read.

Writing should be a forgiving process. I used to take that to mean that you should embrace the constant rewrites and second drafts, but I think it goes beyond that. Writing should be forgiving in the sense that you should forgive yourself for changing along the way. The process of writing is intimately tied to you as a person; at least, it should be. This involves finding yourself in the stories you write, but it can also be a sacrifice, a mirror, or perhaps a tool of dissection. 

In that way, I don’t think I can start a story thinking about the product. To do so would mean to isolate myself from any opportunities to see myself in new ways, to move beyond rigid boundaries of plotlines and character arcs and stay stagnant amongst stagnant words. The passion to write is what I hold on to; holding on to the promise of a finished product is my author deathbed. Life is not death, the act of writing is not the written word.