A Writer's Guide to Finding Flow
On breaking out of forced creativity and "scroll state" into joyous absorption
Walk just a few blocks from my home, and you’ll find yourself on the bank of an ancient river—one of the oldest in the world, older than the Appalachian mountains through which it cuts, older than the Nile.
Where we live, the Susquehanna is a mile-wide life force, in constant motion except for when she freezes over sometimes in the winter. Right now, though, she’s flowing freely, flanked by yellow wildflowers and a walking path where we often go with the kids who want to throw rocks into its current.
The Susquehanna is also one of the steepest river systems in the world, plummeting over 1,000 feet from its source to its mouth. It faithfully follows gravity all the way down to the sea.
I turn to it today, as we continue our summer of rewilding series, to teach us writers something about creative flow.
“Flow state” is a term coined by psychologist and researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe the feeling of being so absorbed in a present experience that time stands still. His observations were informed by rock climbers, dancers, chess players, and surgeons.
Most of these, save for the surgeons, were “in flow” toward no other end but their own enjoyment. And this is something we have to work to understand in our productivity-fixated society. We feel we have to have something to show for our time, that the end result somehow justifies the time spent.
Once again, we are invited to unlearn this assumption, to rewild it entirely.
As one of his interview subjects said, speaking as a poet and mountain climber,
“The act of writing justifies poetry. Climbing is the same: recognizing that you are a flow. The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow.”
Against the productivity mindset, this is a radical thought: the purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing. The destination and arrival is moot. Staying in the flow—faithfully following its gravity—is the reward unto itself.
As a writer, you know flow. You know how elusive it can be, as well as how delicious is its joyous absorption. In the life of the writer, there is no resource more precious than this.
Today, we’re tending to this precious resource. How to find your creative flow, how to protect it, how to enjoy it. But to find our flow state, first we have to break out of what I’ll call force state and scroll state.