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?

To be continued… (click)

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

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