Those Three Little Words That Mean So Much

Learning to ‘trust the process’ can change your life. Trust me. (And the process).

Trust the post-it

I’m in the first draft of a feature script at the moment, with all the ups and downs that entails.

The ups include thoughts like: I’m writing a film script! I used to manage a cinema and now I’m writing a film script!! – inwardly screaming and running around the house like Olive when she’s told she’s through to the finals of the Little Miss Sunshine pageant.

The downs include rather different thoughts, like: What the f— am I doing? Should I really put that there? Is this rubbish? Oh god, it’s rubbish. Is this script going to be any good? At any point? I bet Mike White’s scripts are great off the bat! …and so on.

I often talk to other writers and creatives about how a) the voice of your Inner Critic never goes away but b) you can help it to become quieter, and less frequent, by doing such things as nurturing the voice of your Inner Best Friend instead.

When I’m in the thick of a first draft, my Inner Best Friend reminds me that they’re known as Shitty First Drafts for a reason. That nobody will see this draft but me. That it doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be written. That it doesn’t matter if it’s rubbish for now, as long as I push on through. That I should just keep swimming. At which point I realise that my Inner Best Friend is, in fact, a fish. Called Dory.

If you find the idea of channelling an Inner Best Friend a bit tricky, try channelling the outer Alain de Botton instead. He said: “To become a proper writer, you have to forgive yourself the catastrophe of the first draft.” And I think it was Anne Lamott who talked about a first draft being like a huge pile of mud you’ve hauled in from the garden and just plonked on the kitchen table. A huge great big blob of mud – or indeed, a total catastrophe. That’s all your first attempt needs to be. Because at least then you have, like Sondheim’s George Seurat, “made a hat… where there never was a hat”.

But the mantra I return to time and again when writing – perhaps the most helpful thing my Inner Best Friend can tell me – is those three little words that mean so much: Trust the process.

For me, ‘trust the process’ means: trust that if you keep going, the creative process will take you – or rather, your creative project – to the place you want to get to. ‘Trust the process’ is the all-important ‘for now’ in ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s rubbish for now’, above. Because if you trust the process, you know that the creative piece you’re working on won’t always be rubbish. The process – further drafts, further edits, new ideas that will spring up precisely, indeed only, as a result of you writing that shitty first draft (sorry!) – means it will get better. And it will.

(Fun fact: D:REAM’s famous hit ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ was written by lead singer Peter Cunnah while he was in the middle of a particularly difficult first draft of a screenplay. The original second line was ‘…now I’ve found a solution to that plot issue I was having’.)

The fact that screenwriting is iterative in this way is one reason why I love it. I also love it because learning to write scripts, learning to not quit when I was challenged and instead push through and try to ‘trust the process’, has brought me an element of confidence and self-belief that has extended beyond my writing.

And that’s because, ultimately, ‘trust the process’ means trust yourself.

That’s the real magic and power in this idea. And it’s why it works regardless of what your actual ‘process’ – which varies from person to person, of course, and even from project to project – looks like.

Because what you’re doing when you’re trusting the process is digging deep, overcoming hurdles, solving problems, learning new skills… in other words, you’re learning to realise that you can do these things. That you do have the answers. That the power to do this is all coming from inside you. You! All of you – your Inner Critic and Inner Best Friend, and all those other little guys they hang out with in there. (Note to self: Pitch this to Pixar as Inside Out 4.)

Don’t get me wrong: learning to trust yourself is a process in and of itself (sorry). Even those of us who don’t have trust issues likely still have issues trusting ourselves to a greater or lesser degree – not least because society has a nasty habit of encouraging us to second guess ourselves. Like so many things of this nature, it’s a life’s work.

But it’s worth it. Because joy, satisfaction, growth and, yes, confidence and self-belief comes from learning to trust yourself. It’s a wonderful, sneaky, Trojan horse-style byproduct of trusting the process.

And it’s just one – but an absolutely key – reason why I have such an issue with AI being pushed on anyone as part of their creative process. I’ll write a longer rant piece about AI in the arts and creative industries some other time, but for now: removing the problem-solving, hurdle-overcoming, growth-inducing aspect of the creative process, trying to bypass it with some outcome-driven ‘hack’, means removing not just a huge part of the joy and satisfaction that comes from creativity, but also removing one of the best routes for learning to trust yourself on a wider, deeper level. And removing all the wonderful things that come as a result of that – not just in creativity, but in life.

OK, rant piece over. Here’s wishing you all good luck with your catastrophes/piles of mud/shitty first drafts, my friends. Now I’ve got to get back to mine…