Writers — all artists, I suppose — love to talk about process. Sometimes, though, trying to articulate our process or hearing others’ descriptions only makes us feel like a mess. Novelist Heather Webb captured that in a blog post on Writer Unboxed titled “Your Writing Process Says You’re a Failure.” It’s worth a read. Here’s an excerpt I found particularly striking:

“The writing process is an amorphous, wiggly, glob with a million arms and as soon as I feel like I’ve caught hold of one, it slips out of my hands. … What we need to learn is one of the most important aspects of both being a creative person and also surviving a very difficult business: we must learn to be flexible about our vision. We must also learn to be flexible about the process of how we get from Point A to Point Be.”

Or, as the old bumper sticker says, “Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.”