How do you find creative flow?

Looking for ways to get into the deep work.

picture by me :3

There’s something about the weather getting better outside that makes me extra restless when I get to my desk each day. Fighting off my email inbox, my YouTube addiction and looking for any reason to get out and ditch the task at hand, I’m finding it harder than ever right now to drop in and do the ‘deep work’ that my creative project demands. And so came the inspiration for this week’s question…

‘Flow’ is a concept that has been studied, and a lot of the benefits of being in flow point to productivity and knowledge acquisition. But I wanted to concentrate on another benefit: a sense of wellbeing. My obsession with practice, and figuring out how to keep creating work in a way that feels sustainable, suggests that flow can help on the journey - I want to lock into the ‘deep work’ needed to feel my best as a person, and by extension, feel my best creatively. Time to unpack this.

What we talk about when we talk about flow

Self-forgetful concentration is precisely what happens in the artistic process - an absorption in the moment, a pouring of the self into the now.
- Mark Doty, The Art of Description

Timelessness. Concentration. Satisfaction. These are components of flow. What is interesting to me is that flow states bridge the Venn diagram of wanting to really concentrate and block out the noise of the world (something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately) and actually feeling content or satisfied by what you’ve made or what you’re making.

I can’t talk about flow without mentioning Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s TEDTalk and his research more broadly:

TEDTalks sure have changed a lot over the years. But anyway, here’s a key quote:

There's this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback… You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.

So it’s not just about focus. It’s getting this fulfilment from your process that is of interest to me as a practitioner, but there are a few things here that are hard to square away if you’re in a form like mine. Namely, the idea of ‘immediate feedback’. This is hard if you’re a writer, and in particular, if you are a writer of novels. The project is just too big and a lot of time is spent just trying to complete something enough to be able to get that feedback. It’s also unwieldy enough as a form that sometimes you aren’t sure if you can do it - if it is possible. And beyond that, you are often working alone - so how do you connect to something bigger? All this to say what might seem obvious: Flow states for writers can get complicated.

We know flow is good for us, we know it helps us feel connected to our work. Now what do we do? There are three things to address here:

1. Getting “immediate” feedback;

2. Feeling the work is possible;

3. Feeling part of something bigger.

Let’s explore.

What I’m trying to achieve more flow…

Make the feedback tangible and offer yourself congratulations

Recently, a student of mine expressed feeling a bit deflated by a critique session. I was surprised; she had so many positive comments! But the negatives are just stickier than the positives, and sharing work is vulnerable no matter how far through a project or a career you are. I gave her a suggestion: start collecting your feedback.

A couple of years ago, I started this practice. Then, I managed to forget about it entirely, as time went on, and I told myself that I was ‘beyond’ needing this kind of reminder of my positive achievements (no matter how small). Why did I think that was no longer necessary? I have no idea. I am not beyond needing encouragement. I am a human being, in the end and I want some congratulations from time to time - the problem with writing novels that are not yet published is that it is a practice that gives almost no room for a pat on the back. By extension, it seems you never quite succeed at anything. This flies in the face of the “immediate” feedback component of flow.

Sharing work openly with others can be really tricky. But to take what bell hook said about love as a metaphor, we can’t be "looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment." It takes investment of this kind to find the intimacy which cuts through and enables us to feel embedded in our work.

I’ve found that the feedback I receive from writing these very pieces - wholly unconnected to my main project - helps to give me the energy to do that work. Feedback is feedback; a compliment is a kindness, no matter what it is in relation to. So when people comment on my work here online, I collect it - write it down, screenshot it, keep it in a list. I have to do this, because my brain filters out the positive as a matter of course.

I also spend time reading my work aloud. Many people say to do this as an editing exercise; that is true. But there’s another benefit: taking more time to just take in and appreciate something I’ve made. Again, your words in a novel can sit alone with you for a very long time. Making them tangible, making them occupy space somewhere, gives you the chance to feel that satisfaction more fully and, perhaps, more immediately.

Shuffle (and reshuffle) the routine

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important.
― Joseph Campbell

I spent quite a bit of time recently asking ChatGPT to help me optimise a routine. I was hoping with the power of AI, I’d come up with some amazing new way of arranging my time that I hadn’t thought of before. While I thought ChatGPT did have some interesting suggestions, I realised in the process of implementing changes that there was a more important factor than how I change each part of my routine. Namely, it matters most that I change it.

In other words, a flow-inducing routine is an iterative process. No matter how perfectly I think I’ve cracked the schedule, it becomes too mundane after a period of time. In a long project, injecting new challenges, new ways of working, and mixing up the parameters or environment in which you work, all do something to help keep things just novel enough to keep you engaged.

To me, this isn’t just about making it ‘interesting’. Feeling the work is possible is often a practical question. I don’t feel it’s possible when I look at my work as this enormous, unwieldy mass that cannot be broken down into days, weeks, months. I don’t look at my project and think “write a novel”. I just think about the scene at hand, the time at hand, or even just the sentence at hand. Bit by bit, this amounts to a novel. But by making the routine fun, by keeping things fresh, and reshuffling, I can inject new energy into the process. I can make each “piece” of the process more possible to execute on.

I liked the Joseph Campbell quote above because it links nicely to a point I make further on about the sacred; the idea that by engaging in ritual, I create the myth that comes from a conviction I have about myself and my place in the world. This is exactly why art making is personal, and flow can do so much for us in this process - I believe I have something to express in what I create, and by engaging in and with the ritual that surrounds my creative work, I reaffirm that my process is important to me and my work is not only possible, but valued. It’s a positive feedback loop.

Clear (mental) space

I do not want any human thoughts to soil my aquarium.
- Sayaka Murata

I have always been a meticulous keeper of to-do lists. But something I realised recently is that I have so much going on at any given time, and allocating everything a day and time int he best and most optimal way is just too much to ask. What I need is simplicity. For that reason, I have started using the Brain Dump.

It’s easy: take a piece of paper, write down every single stupid thing you know you have to do or remember, and do not sort it or do anything else with it. Pure expulsion, that’s it. Just get it on the page.

This is another technique that, for me, deals with the possible. It’s not possible for me to do the work if I am also simultaneously worrying about a thousand other things. Those are human thoughts, to play on Murata’s quote. And I don’t want to soil my story aquarium. I want to keep the mind fresh. By clearing out some space, it is more possible for me to give my full attention and creatively problem solve my project.

Make it sacred

In 1876, Emily Dickinson asked Thomas Wentworth Higginson in a letter whether her verses were ‘alive’. She said:

Nature is a haunted house - but Art - is a house that tries to be haunted.

Giving your work life, in a sense, is the great aim of creation. In the Art of Description, Mark Doty talks about the joy of describing the world in prose, and he draws an interesting connection between this very urge that Dickinson describes, and the work of the artist more broadly, saying:

If I were asked to say what distinguishes an artistic temperament from any other, I'd say that it's a fundamental sense that the project of being alive is something peculiar, little understood. I've always felt amazed by - a bit envious of - people who take their lives for granted.

The very act of not taking our lives for granted feels to me very connected to the pursuit of higher purpose - one of the elements of flow that can become obfuscated by a practice that feels very singular and solitary. Looking for that wider sense of self, purpose and belonging, forms an essential element of the satisfaction and wellbeing flow can offer us. As artists, we don’t take our existence for granted. To me, this is about recognising the practice is one part of a life that is sacred.

As a young person, I used to really resist was the idea that somehow, making artistic work was a spiritual practice. Perhaps this was a hangover from the militant atheism that was all the rage in the early 2000s. But I thought that the best thing I could do was to demonstrate staunch practicality, stubbornness, and work ethic. Nothing about my writing practice should feel ‘woo woo’ or sacred. What I didn’t realise, in taking this attitude towards it, was that I was denying myself a way of framing my own work as purposeful. I was denying its largeness, downplaying its potential for satisfaction - and therefore making it much less ripe to offer me contentment.

I don’t necessarily have to pray, or light candles, or do anything in particular, to make the work sacred (though if any of those things integrate into the practice for you, all power to you!). I just have to do the work. This is the reframe: The practice is sacred. It is, in and of itself, an acknowledgement of wanting to contemplate a bigger sense of self. To try to understand our place in the life we barely comprehend. This house hopes to be haunted.

Some final thoughts (for now)…

What will you sacrifice? What other things will you let go, to clear the space for your book?
- Hilary Mantel

Not everything can be done ‘deeply’. Not all work will be your best work. There will always be trade offs. For me, this means getting to know how I work and what I need to do to get the best out of myself - and leaving some space for time when I will just do less deep work. I’ll be a bit distracted, I might not produce at top quality, and that’s okay. I build in some contingency. I know that ‘flow’ might be too tall an order. But I show up to the desk anyway. I am learning, each and every day, to trust. That opens up ways to reframe what’s possible, to give myself the feedback I need, trust my instinct, and finding how to place my work in the larger sense of my life.

The question has a million possible answers, and I’d love to know what practices you are trying out. So, tell me: How are you finding creative flow these days?

Until next time,

Be well.

CCx