Letting the words come
Image: Skitterphoto on Pixabay.
What goes through your head while you’re writing? For many writers, this internal voice is negative, like author Haruki Murakami who said in an interview, ‘When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him.’
To finish my series on writing in the flow state, I want to look at how we can use feedback and novelty to avoid feeling overwhelmed and improve the experience of writing.
Keep going, you’re doing great!
When writing, we often seek external feedback, like asking someone to read over a draft. While this is important for the finished product, it isn’t helpful for keeping us in the flow state to get words down on the page, because the feedback takes too long and is not process-focused.
Automated external feedback which aims to keep us writing longer can arrive much quicker. This might take the form of autocorrect, spellcheck or an AI writing assistant. These act like the bumpers at a bowling alley which allow us to keep writing without mistakes diverting us from our objective.
However, it’s internal feedback that is the most effective at overcoming the ‘poison’ of negative self-talk and staying in the flow state. Positive self-talk allows us to form an internal feedback loop, to continually nudge us back into the pleasurable state of flow. Think about a Post-it note you could stick above your screen which says, ‘Keep going, you’re doing great!’
Make it new
As Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, ‘Too much familiarity breeds contempt’. If you feel stuck writing the same thing over and over, this will be a barrier to your flow. Counterintuitively, constraints can actually pull us into flow.
Guitarist Jack White has found a way of incorporating constraints into his live show to make each performance novel. He says in an interview broadcast on Arte:
I make struggles for myself: I purposely play guitars that are out of tune; things are too far away from me on stage that I can’t reach. I do that all the time because I want to create struggle … I’d rather see them watch me overcome some problem.
The science behind this pursuit of novelty suggests that making something 4% more difficult is the optimal way of sustaining our engagement. This post discusses the ‘flow channel’ where we balance our skills against the challenge in front of us.
We each face our own challenges when writing, but when I’m unsure, I return to the evergreen words of Jodi Picoult: ‘You can’t edit a blank page’.
