Creative Process Manifesto

We deserve to put work out there that is still in progress. This is still in progress.

We deserve systems for sharing and archiving our work that are weirder and wilder than a chronological list of every newsletter we've ever sent.

We deserve rest.

We deserve to re-examine our beliefs about the relationship between effort and outcome.

We deserve to not be told to work harder. We deserve to not be told to work smarter.

We deserve well-designed approaches that let us precisely and iteratively explore what habits and systems will work for our writing practice at this particular time in our life.

We deserve to look systematically at what works in terms of our habits and writing practice, and we deserve language and frameworks to do this that aren't borrowed from cis white tech bros who want to talk about "productivity hacks," "habits optimization," or whatever.

We deserve to clarify and define what we specifically desire from our use of various software tools, platforms, etc, and to evaluate our use of them based on our specific needs and desires. Based on our evaluation, we deserve to radically reshape or abandon our use of these tools, as appropriate to our needs.

We deserve to shamelessly ignore any and all "Best Practices" or writing process advice that feels like it won't actually work for us in our lives.

We deserve to systematically and precisely define our goals for our own writing, and not to feel we need to use someone else's metric in order to know if we are satisfied with our writing life.

We deserve to not beat ourselves up for not writing enough, not working hard enough, etc. We deserve to understand that these are often systems issues, not personal failings.

We deserve to joyfully and shamelessly ignore any and all writing process advice that feels like it won't actually work for us.

We deserve well-designed approaches that let us experiment with what habits and systems will work for our own writing practice.

We deserve systems for sharing our work that are weirder and wilder than a chronological list of every newsletter we've ever sent.

We deserve to redefine our beliefs about the relationship between effort and outcome.

We deserve frameworks to look systematically at what works for our writing practice, without borrowing from the language of "productivity hacks," "habits optimization," or whatever else is popular in grind culture.

We deserve to be the experts on our own writing process and creative life.