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.

…to be continued (click)

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

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