How do you get the results you’re after with your fiction or memoir? What’s the quickest route to finishing your story and successfully finding representation? Or self publishing with significant sales? What do you evaluate in your story?
In this episode, we’ll talk about process versus product, and the two most important qualities to evaluate in your work. So you can move closer to the end result you’re after.
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Episode at a glance:
[01:28] The Result-Focused Fallacy
This is the ROI – your return on investment. Your investment in time and money. Your investment in editors, workshops, learning, rewriting, revising and revising again. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to publish and get your work into the marketplace. It’s the timing that’s off. It’s most often premature. Paradoxically, this focus on results keeps you from getting the result you want.
[04:40] Process Over Product
Results are temporary, but your process is ongoing. Publishing is not the only reward – and it’s temporary. The writing itself is a reward. Through writing, we get to crystallize our view of the world, we move towards deeper self knowledge and compassion for ourselves and others. We get to explore and break open things that fascinate us, obsess us, or haunt us. Story is deep exploration into self, into what it means to be human. So external rewards are temporary, but your process is ongoing.
[07:14] Process and Product Can Co-Exist
The way to bring process and product together is to cultivate the ability to self-evaluate your own work, and by that I mean, you evaluate your process, not your product.This is not about mining mistakes to fix in your manuscript. Instead of evaluating your work’s quality, you want to evaluate it in qualities. And there are 2 qualities you want to evaluate.
[08:30] 1. Presence
Your presence is your involvement in each scene. Your emotional involvement with your characters. And you can evaluate this as you write. You’ll know when you’re connected vs. writing what you think a story should be – when you’re more focused on a set of preconceived requirements than your own experience of doing the work.
[11:46] 2. Truth
By truth, I don’t mean that it really happened. By truth, I mean, do you believe in the story you’re creating? Truth and presence is a matter of distance, the less distance between you and the thing you create, the more true it is, and the more true it will feel to your reader.
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