Writing should be fun, but it seems impossible to make it fun. Last week we touched on some negative aspects of writing: the inevitable stuck places, the frustrations, the overwhelm. This week we’ll explore the flip side: the goal of overcoming all that and attaining the enjoyable, Zen-like state of flow!
The frustrations of writing and the flow of writing are intimately connected. Without a clear picture of what the goal is, all the struggle will seem meaningless. And without naming and exploring the struggle, talking about the goal will come across as preachy and unrealistic. As we see it, achieving the goal of flow in writing (and in life) is a slow, long process of stripping away old habits, developing new habits, and attending carefully to the stories we tell about both. There are few shortcuts. But as we become more mature writers, we grow more capable of diagnosing our stuck places and getting unstuck.
The Flow State
So let’s talk about flow in a bit more depth. The concept was named and popularized by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (what a name!) to describe a very general state of attention and energy: one in which we feel “in the zone”–deeply engaged with the task. In the flow state, self-consciousness reduces or disappears, the sense of time passing can be warped, the sense of self may be reduced or fall away, and people report a deep sense of harmony and enjoyment of the task. Flow is attained in all sorts of tasks by people in all walks of life.
What is conducive to attaining flow? Three things. First, the task must have clear goals. Second, we need immediate feedback about how well we’re doing. Third, there needs to be an appropriate balance between skills and challenges. Inappropriate balance between skills and challenges leads to boredom (if the task feels too easy) or anxiety (if the task feels too hard), as we can see on this (somewhat busy) chart:
Flow and Writing
How does this map of flow and its factors apply to writing?
First, as we write we can get better and better at having clear goals for ourselves. This usually means implementing SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. SMART goals make it more likely for the writing task to be conducive to flow. Of course, implementing SMART goals presupposes some self-regulation skills, and if we are realistic, we all lack some part of a full self-regulation skill set. So we need to be honest with ourselves at the outset as a condition of getting better at SMART goals.
Second, immediate feedback is usually not attainable in writing tasks. If our goal is to write a good piece, and the goodness of the piece is determined in part by other people’s feedback, then there’s no possibility of immediate feedback. But even here we can reframe to find some immediate feedback. If our goal is to write 500 words, that’s the sort of thing that affords immediate, internal feedback. Sometimes the goals need to be tiny, like “write the next sentence”. There’s a whole skill set here in turning off our critical, editorial tendencies and just getting some words on a page.
Third, the balance between skills and challenge is something we can intervene on. For very hard or overwhelming tasks we can implement SMART goals to break them down to sub-goals, and the felt challenge of the task should decrease. Which will make us more likely to achieve flow. In the medium-to-long-term we of course deliberately practice our skills so that we can rise to ever-tougher challenges.
Like all quick rundowns, this is more of a map than a specific skill set. But having the map might be helpful as you navigate your many diverse writing struggles!
References:
Csikszentmihaly, M. (2008). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper and Row.