The Process is the Product

As an artist, do you let the ideas freely drive the process, or do you first consider the end result and accept or reject the ideas accordingly?

Simone de Beauvoir posits:

"Which action is good? Which is bad? To ask such a question is also to fall into a naive abstraction. We don’t ask the physicist, “Which hypotheses are true?” Nor the artist, “By what procedures does one produce a work whose beauty is guaranteed?” Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art. One can merely propose methods. Thus, in science the fundamental problem is to make the idea adequate to its content and the law adequate to the facts; the logician finds that in the case where the pressure of the given fact bursts the concept which serves to comprehend it, one is obliged to invent another concept; but he can not define a priori the moment of invention, still less foresee it. Analogously, one may say that in the case where the content of the action falsifies its meaning, one must modify not the meaning, which is here willed absolutely, but the content itself; however, it is impossible to determine this relationship between meaning and content abstractly and universally: there must be a trial and decision in each case. But likewise just as the physicist finds it profitable to reflect on the conditions of scientific invention and the artist on those of artistic creation without expecting any ready-made solutions to come from these reflections, it is useful for the man of action to find out under what conditions his undertakings are valid." [more...]

From my own musings on process from Dynaxiom:

0589. To abandon something is at least a partial admission that it was not worth the investment of time.

0946. You can get a lot done by relating everything you do to a few core ideas or projects. You can always be doing something (or something else) and doing Something in the process.

0893. It's always more interesting to have some kind of 'slippage' happening during the creative process, where it's more hands-off, and removes the possibility of using too much top-down control. Rock 'n' Roll was originally about this but lost this aspect over time. Much of that slippage is junk, and we are tasked with separating it out.

1133. If creative work is in the flow of your life, why not begin the serial process and follow it through? A natural branching occurs the longer you do it. But the objective is not only to gather and glean, but to also cultivate and prune the list, and give it power to be generative.

1306. The thinking process while involved in a creative task is always more clear both in hindsight and foresight: It's the moment you say, "That's what I was thinking about doing." (which then becomes the 'insight'), but the insight you initially had probably never resembles the afterthoughts.

1399. Much of creativity is the investment of time in the thought process that gives rise to it. It's a perfect feedback loop from idea to object to ideas the object inspires.