Your Feelings as a Creator Are Irrelevant

Verlyn Klinkenborg points out that “your job as a writer is to make sentences. Your other jobs include fixing sentences, killing sentences, and arranging sentences. If this is the case—making, fixing, killing, arranging—how can your writing possibly flow? It can’t. Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer. A writer may write painstakingly, assembling the work slowly, like a mosaic, fitting and refitting sentences and paragraphs over the years. And yet, to the reader, the writing may seem to flow.”

Most of us were never told this. So we sit down to write and wait for inspiration to start flowing — a current that carries us forward, with words arriving before we need them. When it doesn’t come, we assume something is wrong — with us or with the work. So we stop.

Writers fall into the trap of looking for the reader’s experience while doing the writer’s job. The same is true of a nonprofit board, which doesn’t get the same joy as the participant experience. Your plumber doesn’t fix your pipes because it feels transcendent. They do it because they’re professionals, and the work is the work.

That joy someone experiences in the work we do comes later, and we are not entitled to be part of it. And if we’re stuck in the hard part of the work — when it doesn’t feel fun anymore — that’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. That’s the job.