Yesterday, a friend and I were talking about the difficulty of making changes in one’s life. “The thing is,” she said, “you have to move at your own speed.” So very true, and that same advice applies to art as well. We all get caught up in believing that we have to crank out piece after piece because the Internet expects it. We “need to have” x number of postings to whichever platform(s) we are on every day/week/month to remain relevant. And if the quality suffers, well, that’s just the way things are.

Except that’s not true. If the quality suffers, it’s likely that no matter how many pieces we upload, we will lose viewers. We need to move at our own pace, whatever that pace is. It doesn’t matter if we produce three novels or thirty, so long as we are satisfied that they are the highest quality that we can produce at the time. Each artist has their own rhythm. Each artist has their own workflow. And it is the rhythm and the workflow that determine the frequency of quality output of each artist.

And that frequency may be at odds with the “demands of the Internet.” And if it is, that’s okay. I follow some people who post multiple times per day, some who post daily, some who post weekly, some who post monthly, and some who post whenever they have something to say or show, and I find that I don’t appreciate one more than the other. In fact, I would much rather see the quality work of those who post infrequently than mediocre work of some who post daily.

After all, the “demands of the Internet” are nothing more than marketing ideas. Admittedly, we have to market our art, but we don’t have to follow marketing ideas slavishly. Indeed, there are a number of artists who completely ignore Internet marketing advice who do quite well. The question is: are we trying to develop a large social media following or trying to market our art. Those two are not necessarily the same thing, regardless of what social media marketers say. And we need to remember that being active regularly on social media does not necessarily mean posting our work; it can also mean commenting on the work of others or the political situation or any number of other things that keep our names before our followers.

So, perhaps instead of feeling pressured to produce at a rate determined by outside forces, we might take note of our frequency of quality output and then determine the frequency of our public posting of work based on that.

That way we can indeed work at our own speed, and be far more comfortable in producing work of quality instead of feeling pushed and prodded by an external system. Additionally, we can remind ourselves that our speed does not have to match anyone else’s.  Maybe then we can produce and market our best work, saving less successful pieces for reworking and revising until they too meet our personal standard of quality.

In his book Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad, Austin Kleon describes his two-year-old son’s approach to drawing as a model for the artist because it displayed “a kind of lightness and detachment” from results: “he cared not one bit about the actual finished drawing (the noun)—all his energy was focused on drawing (the verb). When he’d made the drawing, I could erase it, toss it in the recycling bin, or hang it on the wall. He really didn’t care.”

A similar approach is exemplified in an episode of the Amazon Prime television series I Love Dick. Dick is an enigmatic icon-cowboy-sculptor who sponsors fellowships for artists and scholars in Marfa, Texas. In this particular episode, an intoxicated Dick discovers that his brick sculpture has been broken into three pieces. Instead of exploding with anger the way Paula the curator did, he instead takes a moment, considers, and arranges the three pieces into a new configuration. Smiling with satisfaction, he looks at his new creation and then changes the date on the label. (Dick does not name his pieces.)

In both cases it’s the making that matters. In the section cited above, Kleon goes on to say that “art and the artist both suffer most when the artist gets too heavy, too focused on results.” He continues with example of Kurt Vonnegut who advocated making art and then destroying it in order to keep the artist’s approach to the work light and detached. Then, of course, there is the story of the art professor who, in every beginning ceramics class, would have students destroy their first finished pieces to drive home the point that it was not the product that mattered.

Both film and stage directors will sometimes spend months shaping and molding performances to create the best work that they can, but then, instead of dwelling on the finished product, they move on to the next project. Indeed, the only time directors revisit already-done work is when they want to better what they’ve already done. One example of this phenomenon is Francis Ford Coppola and his revisions of The Godfather, Part III, Apocalypse Now, and The Cotton Club. Again, it’s the making that matters.

In the most extreme case, some artists want some, if not all, of their work destroyed. This includes Franz Kafka, John Baldessari, Claude Monet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Aubrey Beardsley, and Francis Bacon. In these cases, nothing but the making mattered; the product mattered not at all.

Certainly, I am not suggesting that we take things to the extreme. What I am suggesting is that we move our focus from the product to the making of any project that we might be attempting. By doing so, we can maintain a healthy detachment from the results and concentrate on those things that are necessary to craft that project.

Concentrating on the making rather than the result changes the way that we think about the project. It frees us to really dig in and focus on the details of the project; it allows us to exploit the full extent of our creativity rather than just focusing on the outcome. It allows us to lose ourselves in the project and do our best work. It’s the making that matters.