For a creative process to be effective, it is important not to take things, particularly your own work, too seriously. That is why it is sometimes useful to choose disposable media for your work to avoid putting excessive emphasis on the result, where the process is inherently more valuable. Julia Cameron wrote in “The Artist’s Way” that in order to make art, we must be ready to make bad art, at least initially. I heard some writers say that if you work for hours to write a thousand words, and then end up throwing out everything except the last couple of sentences in revisions, the hours spent on this should not be considered a wasted time – writing the text that was ultimately thrown out was a necessary step in creating the last two good sentences.
In other words, it’s no big deal that it takes longer than what we thought it should have taken to create something of value. We should just accept it and enjoy the process. After all, they said at my daughter’s party that the main rule of the art studio was “Have fun!”
