Process and Result in Writing

  I am reflecting tonight on how I tend to think mainly about results when it comes to writing, as well as "overarching" trajectory. It's almost as if I want to reduce the process of writing (or distill it) down to one particular thing or theme. It's something that has been socialized in me, and I suspect that as many people get to university, they are pressured to specialize in some way. Thus, rather than writing about several things at once, we are asked to whittle our interests down to one or two sizable subjects. The pressure in writing is often not to expand one's thoughts but to distill them and to put them in focus. Otherwise, we will end up cluttering the page (or the screen, in this case) with too many ideas and thoughts.
   This mentality of trying to distill our thinking into one or two ideas is quite good, and it's the basis for writing in general. But sometimes what it results in is a kind of premature narrowing of one's thinking before creative ideas can really come out to the fore. I suspect that when I come to write, I am so determined to have a single point or purpose in writing that I forego the "painful" process of brainstorming or free-flowing that should probably precede any proposals or written work. Could it be that I have become so attached to the "final result" of a written piece that I might try to forego the messier dynamics of arriving at a writing topic that is original and worth exploring using new lenses?
   What I think might be missing or somewhat lacking here is the trust that what seems chaotic and disconnected will eventually resolve, with time and effort, into new discoveries or connections. Time is actually perhaps more crucial than effort: there are many times when I have read accounts of creative people who tried too hard to push for a resolution to their unresolved questions and doubts that they ended up exhausting their ideas, only to find a novel solution when their mind seemed least focused on it. We form connections, but sometimes the conscious mind only puts together the more obvious ones, which have been used time and again.
  What I am arguing is to forego specialization for a while in the initial planning stages of the creative process, and to allow things to be a bit messy without concluding that this is a kind of failure.  It's only when I have many different ideas laid out on the table that I can later pick and choose the ones that might make for intriguing research topics or ideas. However, if I push too hard for ideas to conform to a "master idea" that I am already enamored with from the get-go, I fail to see more intriguing or novel connections that can come when the mind is simply open, and not discriminating one idea as "good" or the other as "bad". I think this also requires the maturity of knowing that published (or publishable) results are never final ones, and that the process is always recursive and branching further into new possibilities.