The Process Perspective

Tips for Inspiring Yourself

• Why focus on the writing process?
• Don’t I already know my own story?
• Why do I need a Process Notebook?

Process and Inspiration

When beginners start writing, they often want to go straight to getting published. They dismiss talk about the process as grunt work or assume that writing well is something that just happens mystically.

Inspiration does strike on occasion. When you’re on a creative roll, you may feel transported, but inspiration also requires the right conditions and plenty of practice. In Finding Your First-Person Voice, you may be inspired by other people or close observations of nature. You’ll likely be inspired by reading other writers, as suggested in the “Opening Inspiration” at the end of this section.

How many of us truly understand everything about who we are?

Yet thinking about your process is inspirational, too. How many of us truly understand everything about who we are, our cultures, or our changes over time? Probably no one, but writers and creative people make meaning of their lives by processing them draft after sketch after scribble on a cafe napkin.

Process and Meaning

Becoming a first-person writer goes beyond one draft or a single story. And the way you arrive at a story – especially a personal story – determines the final product. That process is messy. Finding your voice isn’t a logic problem to be solved. As Peter Elbow notes of the process in his classic Writing Without Teachers, “Meaning is not what you start out with but what you end up with.” ^[1]

The writing process is messy.

The best personal storytellers aren’t parrots, machines, or emotional dump trucks. They aren’t trained psychologists, either. They’re people who tap into both their internal world and the community around them. They respond to life and keep responding.

As with thinking, writing gets better with practice.

Documenting Your Personal Journey

The starting place for most writers is their notebook. Establishing a safe and private space to put down your thoughts and messy drafts – and to document your journey as a writer – is a key “Lesson for Life.”

Creating your Process Notebook is the foundation for these lessons. It’s one of the only requirements before you begin the first lesson, and the options and links for doing so appear in the next chapter.

The other requirement is setting three writing goals for yourself. These goals will guide the self-evaluations you do in your notebook at the close of each lesson.

You don’t have to rely on teachers or the Muse.

Documenting your process and progress may seem overly analytical, but such questioning is one of the four key mental tools for personal storytelling. It can yield insights based on what matters most to you. Instead of relying on a teacher’s comments or the Muse, you’ll inspire yourself to keep writing.