Collage by Helen Sword
When you fantasize about writing freely and prolifically, what metaphors spring to mind?
For many writers, those rare periods of effortless productivity when swirling ideas coalesce and perfect sentences appear as though by magic on the page can be summed up in a single word: flow.
The opposite of flow is frustration, academic writers' most frequently mentioned emotion word. (See Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write, Chapter 10). Writers sometimes invoke intestinal blockages (“constipation”), plumbing blockages (“a feeling of being clogged”), and blocked waterways (“stuck in the quagmire of detail”) to describe their feelings of frustration when their sentences don’t flow.
The recent death of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi inspired me to revisit his classic book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, which I highly recommend to anyone wanting to deepen their creative practice. Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as a state of utter absorption in a task that lies just beyond the limits of our abilities, neither so easy that we find it boring nor so challenging that we find it impossible:
It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair, when the boat lunges through the waves like a colt—sails, hull, wind, and sea humming a harmony that vibrates in the sailor’s veins. It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator. . . . The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost. (pp 3, 16)
According to Csikszentmihalyi, anyone can learn to enter the flow state more or less at will by setting up the right conditions, including an uninterrupted period of time in which to work and an attitude of willingness rather than resistance. Yet even when all of these conditions are in place, the flow of writing can remain elusive, more like a magic spring guarded by a fickle muse than a steady stream of words to be turned on or off at will.
The problem, I suspect, is that writers tend to conflate what Csikszentmihalyi calls “the flow state” with the easy flow of perfectly formed sentences onto the waiting page. In fact, we can be "in flow" at any stage of the writing process: not just when our words are flowing freely but also when we are deeply absorbed in the pleasures of brainstorming, mind-mapping, pre-writing, or polishing.
I created this week's collage while in a state of flow, happily immersed in the challenge of visually representing the concept of flow in all its beauty and complexity. I started with an aerial photograph of a braided river, then layered meandering channels of marbled blue paper over hand-inked text and patterned paper invoking geological and botanic forms.
The creative process, like a braided river, is a delicate ecosystem prone to both silting and flooding. As writers, we can find flow in both the silt and the flood, in contemplative silence as well as in the headlong rush of new words.
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