Whenever I start moaning about the writing life — which happens a lot — my friend Garret is ready with a mantra: “You’re entitled to the work, not to the fruits thereto.”

It may sound vaguely biblical, but the origin of this saying, which encapsulates so much wisdom about creative work, is actually the Bhagavad-Gita, one of the foundation texts of Hinduism.

What Garret means by it — aside from a thinly veiled message to her friend to quit whining and get back to work — is that the act of writing is its own reward. And to be fair, it does feel that way when it’s going well. When everything is clicking, my writing desk will vanish, and I’ll enter a relationship with my story so powerful and direct that the so-called “real world” pales by comparison. Everything else will fall away, along with all of my petty worries and preoccupations.

I can trace this feeling back to childhood; perhaps you can, too. I remember how easy it was to pick up a toy and play. It didn’t take much — if memory serves, I got a lot of mileage out of leaf litter and playground debris. But I was ready — and not just ready, but hungry — to plunge into the world of imagination. Even with strangers.

These days, it’s a lot harder to play. The world is full of distractions — “false attachments,” in the language of the Gita. Days, and sometimes weeks, will pass in a kind of stand-off: Olshan v. Olshan. My ego will be in high gear. I’ll be obsessed with the “fruits thereto:” languishing book sales; puny royalties; Internet piracy. Obsessive Google searches will eat up precious working hours. Any other profession will seem preferable. Want a steady paycheck? Benefits? Job security? Then DON’T WRITE NOVELS!

Be honest. If you showed up to your job tomorrow, and your boss said, “Guess what? We can’t pay you any more!”, would you still sit down at your desk, or unpack your tools, and keep at it? What kind of crazy person gives away his time, labor, and expertise for free? Who has that luxury? And while we’re at it, what’s the point of work — any work — if there are no “fruits thereto?”

Unfortunately, in the topsy-turvy world of creative work, that kind of thinking is the enemy. Time isn’t money. In fact, time doesn’t matter at all. Neither does word count. The strength of the final piece depends on the writer’s willingness to “drown her darlings;” in other words, to axe anything superfluous or weak, no matter the personal attachment to the material.

Some writers get to the good stuff quicker than others. I used to think I was one of the quick ones, but now I know better. If I have to write ten execrable pages to get one decent page, so be it. “Nothing is wasted!” is another of Garret’s gems.

In our commoditized society, the finished product is everything. Things that can’t be bought and sold have no value — literally. So what are you to make of all those weeks, or even months, of discarded work?

For the sake of your sanity, you have to believe that all those pages were necessary. You can call them scaffolding, if it makes you feel better, but even that metaphor suggests that what matters is a result, not the process. For the truly faithful — and writing this way is, above all, an expression of faith — there’s no difference between a useless digression and a page of sparkling prose, if they were both written in the right spirit. In fact, “useless digression” and “sparkling prose” are simply two ways of describing the same false attachment.

There’s a paradox in seeing a finished novel not as the endpoint of years of work, but as an artificial, and even somewhat arbitrary, stand-in for the entire process: just one shed skin of the snake’s many possible skins. Knowing when a book is done is one of the many challenges of the craft. It can boil down to something as simple as: “I’m bored of working on it.”

If you’re lucky, at that point, you’ve got something you can sell. But even if the pages sit there in a seemingly useless heap, inert and stillborn, they’ve served a purpose. Nothing is wasted. The work has changed you, brought you into contact with something timeless and huge.

Compared to that, the “fruits thereof” seem like small potatoes.