You Don’t Have to Know Where You’re Going

[Note: if you would rather read an article instead of watching or listening, you can read such here.]

Sometimes the best conversations start because somebody says something almost in passing.

I was listening to Kevin Tumlinson on The Word Slinger Podcast when he mentioned that, for all the talking he does about writing and publishing, he doesn’t get to talk about the actual craft of writing as often as you might expect. Maybe, he suggested, he just needed somebody to ask him questions.

Well, I can ask questions.

That led to an email, a bad pun about “Kevin on Kraft” (yes, we know it’s cheesy—maybe we’ll make it “Kevin on Craft”), and eventually this conversation.

Kevin and I decided to borrow an idea from Rachael Herron and Sacha Black, who periodically record a conversation together and then each use it on their respective podcasts. So you may encounter this conversation here on The Alignment Show, over on The Word Slinger Podcast, or, knowing Kevin, possibly on the back of a cereal box.

What started as a conversation about writing craft quickly became something broader: creativity, discovery, getting unstuck, allowing imperfect work to exist, and recognizing that the creative process rarely follows the neat categories we use when we talk about it.

The Big Takeaway

One idea kept resurfacing for me: you don’t have to know everything before you begin.

Kevin often starts a novel with little more than a title and an interesting possibility. The characters emerge as he writes. The plot develops alongside them. And when he gets stuck, he doesn’t necessarily take that as evidence that something has gone wrong. Sometimes he loops back through what he has already written. Sometimes he throws something ridiculous into the story just to see what happens.

As Kevin put it, writing gives us an advantage real life doesn’t:

“The laws of physics do not apply. So you can, in fact, travel through time and alter the past.”