Writer's block, an owner's guide: Writer’s Block and the Zone (part 2 of several)
We were talking about flow or, if you like, about getting in the zone. We can’t talk like that without mentioning Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. He’s the flow-to guy, been researching it since the 1970s.
And after all that, as far as I know, he still can’t define it.
And that’s the way it should be, for we are talking here about subjective experience, which is a thing we can’t share in words. Each of us lives inside a rather small skull and we can never really connect. When I say “anger” or “delight” or “love” the feeling my word conjures up in your mind may be totally different from the experience I was trying to share. Who can say? Who can ever say? Just the ability to have the conversation is a surprising piece of magic, isn’t it? It gives us the comforting illusion that we get one another. I think that’s a good thing.
Some folks fault Csikszentmihalyi for being “unscientific” and I’m not going to get into whether they are right or wrong.
(long passage deleted about existentialism, social constructionism, constructivism, postmodernism in general and humanism. It wasn’t relevant to writer�s block. Consider yourself lucky.)
So, anyway. Flow is… remember I said that flow is that feeling of being in the moment, totally absorbed in some activity to the exclusion of all else?
This “exclusion of all else” is important, according to Csikszentmihalyi. The activity is its own reward. The experience of climbing a challenging pitch is why you climb it. The experience of the great sports professional, of the great pioneering surgeon, of the great jazz trumpeter: that experience is why they do it. Fame and money are cool and welcome, but in the moment of effort and concentration and testing yourself they don’t matter.
This is part of Csikszentmihalyi’s description of what flow is. It occurs during “autotelic” activities. The Greek means something like “self-goaling” activities. To be in flow you have to be doing one of those. That’s the Zen of the Zone: in order to achieve flow you have to be trying to achieve something else.
Long-term readers of Today I Write will notice that this Greek word is reminiscent of Mike Apter’s “paratelic.” This would mean something like “beyond goals.” In the paratelic state you are doing an activity for its own sake rather than to achieve some other goal.
“Reminiscent”? Isn’t it even the same thing?
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Published on April 7, 2005 at 6:53 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/writers-block-and-the-zone-part-2-of-several.html
Writer's block, an owner's guide: Writer’s block and the Zone (part 1)
What is flow, exactly? Lotsa luck finding that out from anything that’s been written about it. Including the article you’re reading now.
But we all know it when we see it, a thing that nobody else can explain to you, like being in love, or riding a bike, or knowing what I mean when I say to you “happy.”
We all know what it is to be in flow. It’s the experience of doing something so absorbing that it stills the yamayama in your head. For me it’s the sport of orienteering, which can occupy my body and mind to the exclusion of everything else. Climbing a mountain has never done it for me, oh how I wish it would; climbing a rockface has. Running beyond the 20-minute impossibility barrier can do it, if my memory serves.
It’s the experience of ski-ing, of playing jazz, of race driving - anything that demands all of your skill and gives nothing back except the pure in-the-moment satisfaction of doing it. Okay, so maybe you get money or fame or ice cream, but in that moment those things are secondary. As a boxer, a golfer or a tennis pro takes that final swing that clinches the match, they’re not thinking about the prize money; if they did that, they’d lose focus on the here-and-now activity and they’d lose the money as well.
Performing my art of psychotherapy absorbs me, too. Part of what people like about being users of therapy (I guess) is the amazing discovery that an interested adult is genuinely concentrating on their challenges and their strengths for fifty minutes (you don’t even get that from your lover; you’re not entitled to that from your lover; how self-centered you’d have to be to ask for it!). After the very best meetings, when the therapist can’t recall having to think hard or to root around in the toolbag for clever techniques, and can only remember sharing an absorbing purposeful conversation, he may say to co-workers “I was totally in flow.”
The same state is experienced by musicians, dancers, painters, sculptors and so on.
It’s also been reported by writers but not so much. Why? Well, let’s see. I guess when the body and the attention are both involved, it’s easier for flow to occur. Also, it’s easier to begin an activity that involves actually doing something: if you are a sculptor or a dancer rather than a writer, there’s less chance to pretend you’re busy with “research” or something when you’re just looking around random web sites.
1. How can writers get into flow? That�s a great question, which we’ll come back to when I get around to telling you about Susan Perry’s research.
2. Why does it matter if they do or not? That’s another great question, to which the answer is “Well, because it’s fun and because you get a lot of work done.” But does flow improve the quality of writing too? That’s another great question, and thank you very much.
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Published on April 5, 2005 at 6:05 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/writers-block-and-the-zone-part-1.html
Writer's block, an owner's guide: Self-determination theory
When I was a law student, one of the ways I survived financially was by selling my body to science. I was wired up for early experiments by IT scientists on how humans scan a scene to identify what they are looking at. I was tested for left-handedness and told I was less lefty than I thought. I was observed taking part in some negotiation or other. And so forth.
Meanwhile, over in America, students were getting paid to solve puzzles.
Edward Deci promised some of his volunteers a dollar for every puzzle they solved. A second group were told they would not be paid. Then the students were turned loose to solve the puzzles. When time was up, one group of students wanted to go on playing with the puzzles; the other group stopped willingly at every opportunity and sat doing nothing or doing something else.
What Deci found - contradicting the psychological theories of the time - was that the students who had not been offered money were the ones who took a personal interest in the activity. “Introducing monetary rewards seems to have made students dependent on these rewards, shifting their view from the puzzle as a satisfying activity in its own right to an activity that is instrumental for obtaining rewards.”
Seems strange? Yes, and seems true, too. Once upon a time there was a creative project I was keen to do. I negotiated with a grad school teacher to get three units of academic credit for doing it. As soon as he agreed, I lost interest, I dropped the class and I still haven’t done my project.
Is this why some of us would willingly write for fun and for ever, but as soon as we start to write with the hope of wealth and fame, our minds turn it into a j.o.b. and we treat it the same way as we treat the day job? Is this why actors and writers of proven talent, who come out here to Hollywood, have difficulty doing what it takes to succeed - even apparently-simple things like mailing their resumes to agents? Is this why people who write for their own delight, and manage to sell the product, find it hard to work on the second book in spite of having guaranteed sales and a waiting approving public?
Waddaya think?
Published on August 4, 2004 at 5:48 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/self-determination-theory.html
Writer's block, an owner's guide: Writing as part of who you are
Here’s an interesting story I came across in my adventures in block. Susan X. Day, who had done some research on writer’s block, decided to do more.
Through an editor she contacted four suitable creative writers. Picture them if you want to: a 19-year old writer of drama, fiction and poetry, who’d recently had a play produced at his university; two established poets in their mid-40s, male and female, both with day jobs as professors; and an unpublished novelist in his mid-30s.
She met each of them four times, first to focus on writing history and current projects; then on best and worst writing experiences; then on each individual’s writing process; and lastly for an in-depth discussion of the evolution of a particular piece of work.
Here’s what she found. Each one had felt isolated from peers as a child. Each one had a strong sense of being odd, of being an outsider. Because they were also competent and intelligent, each one managed to elevate oddity to a virtue, in what she calls a self-protecting maneuver. They also became fascinated with oddity in the outside world and integrated this interest into their identities and their writing.
So, what did these people say about writer’s block?
As much as Aristotle did (we were talking about him yesterday, ok?).
None of them identified block as a major challenge.
Once she realized this, she changed the original direction of her research and she wrote a report about something else. So Susan X Day goes out of our story.
But not really. Really I think her report could end up being a key part of whatever it is I’m building here. Look, here we have a group of adult writers who don’t report that blocking is a problem. Isn’t that great? If we knew what it is that keeps them immune, we’d have something that most writers would trade us their souls for! And then we’d have a lot of souls! We could start our own paradise! We could… wait, I’m ok.
Day says that
1) none of her people expect to make a living at writing. They all have day jobs. I think this hints at something important - not at some well-known depressing fact about the writing life, no no, at an essential shining clear insight into the wonders of your vocation - look, it’s not that you mustn’t make a living out of writing, not even that you mustn’t want to, it’s simply that good writing happens when you’re doing writing for its own sake.
This, I suspect, ‘ll be a major group of threads as my blog grows towards whatever its critical mass is: (1) the relationship between the psychology of productive writing and the psychology of flow (2) its relationship with other motivational theories (3) “second novel syndrome”.
2) also, writers face rejections and disappointments: few are published in major channels. So why do we bother” Day says, “Something else must drive their persistence.” (I’m not sure that’s true - I’ve met enough Hollywood folks to know that a lot of talented creative people live on hope. But anyway.) Day believes that to have this something else inside you, creative writing must be a part of who you are. Part of how you make sense of life. And a big part - so big that it is “fully imbued in [your] sense of self, as perhaps gender is for most of us, and not to be a creative writer would feel alien and inauthentic in a most disturbing way.” The experience of writing like that, of expressing your very self, of being authentic, must be far more satisfying than what most of us find in our jobs or, let’s face it, in our writing.
Time to wrap this up. What’s my point today?
I think the only point is a nugget of worthy advice which would be hard for someone like me to follow. Write for the pleasure of it, not for the fame and money! Yeah, right.
But there is something else here. Why is it easier for me to write about Susan X Day in a blog entry than in an academic paper (I know it is, I have done both)? It’s definitely not about fame or money. I have two ideas; one, here I am free of other people’s goals and rules, and I can write freely like the unblocked writer I was as a child; and two, these 778 words today are a tiny patch for an intimidatingly huge quilt that I am aware of wanting to sew, but by writing them as one little blog post I don’t have to think about that.
Not today. Today I write.
Published on August 1, 2004 at 9:03 am. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/writing-as-part-of-who-you-are.html
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