Do you all experience flow? Or rather, as I think everyone does at times, do you experience it often? Obviously I have written plenty of words in my life, but this is not generally something you experience when writing blog posts unless you are maybe excoriating someone in an unnecessarily profane way that is–fundamentally–unfair. Like, I hear from other people that this is a thing that might happen, I personally would never stoop to such levels, not even if I were blogging about J.D. Vance.
So, painting something, not a wall, that lets you achieve flow. Maybe even a wall, truly! I paint things with tiny details, sometimes setting the stork scissors to gnaw at the smallest sable brush till only a few hairs remain, fit for the fishscale mail on a lead orc figurine. Not lately, though. No, because I have been WRITING whole-ass NOVELS. Now, you will hear of my speed and think, huh, those must all suck because that is some Danielle Steele shit and first of all, how dare you. How dare you! Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel has written 190 books, have you? Separately, her books do actually suck.
Wait, no, I repent, demi-extravagantly, of the sentence I just typed, which I am imagining to be carved from stone, rather than trivially easily erased. They only kind of suck, because qua type of book they are meant to be, they are superb, and she has sold eight hundred million copies. I just suffer from internalized misogyny–even it would be fairer to say I suffer from toxic masculinity, and I would much sooner read the most trash eighties spy novel in the world than an excellent romance novel* since they make my skin crawl, and are for girls, and therefore repulsive and trifling, dealing with unimportant aspects of life such as family relations, and love, and human flourishing. Not like having a watch with microfiche in it, or killing a Russian man with a spatula, the sort of things Aquinas wrote of in the Summa Theologica (admit it, I could say literally anything was in there and you’d have to shrug vaguely and say, ‘I guess so’ because you did not finish it. I had to read lots of it in Latin, that’s how much I have suffered in this shadowed vale, and I did not nearly finish it.)
BE THAT AS IT MAY since the start of this year I have written three novels (one of which is mid) and a decent novella which I can’t even try to publish until everyone in Bluffton S.C. perishes, has their ashes cast into the marsh, and can no longer be offended, but I am safe in any case because no one publishes novellas; they are too…in betweeny. I mentioned here some time ago that I had the bright idea to write an alternate-history fantasy trilogy about the Napoleonic Wars in which Russia defends herself against the vile French (yay up to a point) but then goes on to unleash magical terror on everyone in a way not likely to be currently popular (unfair to me and to alternate-history Bagration who is just Doing His Duty.) At some point Russia will become a normal country that calm down and stop not be so, you know, in any case it seems likely that before I succumb to death I can publish them.
But what’s it like to write so many words at a time, Belle, you ask, because nine thousand words is a lot of words to write in one day (this is a max, but two thousand is a sad min). Flow! That’s what flow is. Often I intend to do some other things as well as write, like ever mop the stupid floor (it must be said our apartment is 620sqf so you’d think I could manage. Also, Singapore, damn!) But not if the river flows ever on, then I’ll just keep going until I feel faint. It’s so satisfying! The writing is good, also. I’ve read lots of books, so I can judge this. I mean, it’s no Summa Theologica, but that’s because it’s entertaining and full of action and magic, and vices presented in a more appealing fashion than they are in the Secunda Secundae (not to say that isn’t the only interesting bit. Also, isn’t Aquinas just Averroes from wish.com?)
I need to write the third book, but I’ve written two that are like…Jack Vance, basically? What if a woman from Pangasinan had to travel to get her child back from the ‘good neighbors’ in the mountain that towers over the world? Her aswang vassal takes her to the bamboo city lashed to the outside of the ancient spanbridge, days-long? Her childhood friend abandons his dying master, taking with him everything, even the true bombs, salted with heat? And evil wizards from the Department of Charms set on them in rice paddies? I am an immersive daydreamer, but the channel of it has been entirely diverted to thinking of novels (sad in a way). This is what I do when I walk, which I do for more than an hour a day, before sunrise (not now because DC summer is vile, though I’m not sure what my excuse for not getting up at 4:30 is.). At a swift, even pace, on exactly the same route every time, this can be flow also. I polish up dialogue while I’m walking. I make myself cry. I don’t make outlines. Things connect up and I didn’t know they would! So, so satisfying.
But do you know what isn’t flow? Submitting things to agents, which I did just now for the first time of offering a normal novel (the mid one is all story-within-a-story and so on). And how have I managed to make at least one mistake on every form despite clear instructions? They will throw me away because I put a comma in 105,000 when explicitly ordered me to use no special characters, if this happens one more time I swear to god I am going to cut my lower lip off with a hacksaw uydgfcbfwctcv72rdstc. Ok, sorry, right. I’m fine. Now, I’m like this because I am a manic depressive pixie dream girl as I imagine has long been evident. But, if, hypothetically, you were going to be hypomanic, shouldn’t it also be the way in which you get to experience flow? I would feel very sad if no one ever actually published any of my books, and it would certainly be terrible if they took one, it didn’t sell, and they didn’t publish the next two, (my current nightmare) but I think the cliff is too well hung for that. But then what? I would probably just keep writing more so that I could experience flow, and also so I could find out what happens which I don’t, to some degree, know.
Some people experience flow while they do the work for which they are paid, which seems excellent. Or chess puzzles? Which I like more than chess because I am a childish thing who can’t bear to lose but must lose to get better. Art, certainly. Crafts? Like needlework? Gardeners, do you experience flow when you’re doing useful things of the same sort endlessly? I feel it must be repetitive, but that’s not right. For me, kayaking in the marsh when the wind is well against you, or rowing a boat. Shooting at targets, so strangely soothing? Rifles more so, but handguns too, careful breathing. When do you experience flow?
*N.B. does not apply to Georgette Heyer but those are real books.
UPDATE: you know, this isn’t entirely fair to Aquinas, and it might not be his fault that he’s so boring. Plausibly it’s some form of divine providence. But I didn’t baselessly accuse him of unnatural congress with a setee or anything, even though many commentators such as Thomas de Cantimpré and Giles de Lassines have talked about it.
{ 27 comments }
Ebenezer Scrooge 07.27.24 at 11:52 pm
Can flow support footnotes?
John Q 07.28.24 at 1:50 am
I don’t have the attention span for flow. Most days, after training, I knock out my 750 words, then drift off to worry about what’s going on with cryptocurrency, or whether anyone has liked my Mastodon post. Still, if you keep up 750 words a day for 40+ years, you end up with a a lot of words,
Kartik Agaram 07.28.24 at 2:44 am
My most common sources of flow are:
Programming (pretty much my dominant dimension)
Playing chess (but not against too-string opposition; really biased to weaker players, if I’m honest)
Conversations on the internet (usually in some warren far from plazas)
But yes, I find flow also in writing, even though my blog posts are few and far between. Much of my flow-y writing happens in memoranda within bureaucratic organizations. Or in README files in open source git repositories.
DCA 07.28.24 at 3:34 am
Writing and debugging not-too-challenging computer code–so long as the debugging process doesn’t move from “oh, another stupid mistake by me” to “I have no idea what is causing this”: which is rare.
Ingrid Robeyns 07.28.24 at 9:09 am
Wait – 9.000 words, in one day?! What are you taking, Belle? If I write 2000 in a day, I feel superproductive! And I don’t think I can use as an excuse that I’m not writing in my mother tongue, because I think writing in my mother tongue wouldn’t go any faster.
Fingers crossed re: the agent. They are the gatekeepers of the (nonacademic) publishing industry. I’ve been reading some books on writing and the publishing industry in the last month, and they say the best way to get an agent is to get introduced by a published author (in a similar field of writing) who knows you/your work. If that’s an option, it might be worth trying that too. My feeling is that luck plays a big role, unfortunately.
oldster 07.28.24 at 11:38 am
Nope, never experienced flow. Certainly not since I’ve become a slave to a computer screen and its distractions. But I had many decades of life before computers were ubiquitous, and even then I never experienced it.
Sounds nice, though.
I’m glad that you are well and producing writing. Thanks for dropping in to give us an update.
steven t johnson 07.28.24 at 2:23 pm
Is it really “flow” if it has paragraph breaks? On a fine-grained analysis, is there any flow if there’s punctuation other than dots and dashes and a judicious sprinkling of interobangs?
And metaphysically/ontologically speaking, is it possible “flow” is like the ego (or perhaps free will—-wait, are parentheses and brackets not rocks in the stream?—or good taste) epiphenomal as rainbows, visible only from one side, i.e., outside? I mean, is it truly flow if it doesn’t overflow? Cynically, is “flow” tl;dr? Or, charitably, is it the full glass?
Dave M 07.28.24 at 2:37 pm
First, novellas do too get published. Most of the Murderbot series is novellas. But also, I would totally read a Belle novel! Make sure they publish it! Finally, while the final sentence of your third paragraph is perfectly clear, it is grammatically ambiguous, and I admit that I amused myself by reading it as if it meant that killing a Russian man with a spatula was an example of what Thomas wrote in the S.T. (Heh.) Well, I haven’t read it, so maybe it IS in there!
Doug 07.28.24 at 3:22 pm
File off the SC serial numbers and scatter some science fictional furniture around, and sell that novella to one of the parts of Tor. They publish a bunch of novellas, and by the time it’s out in the world you’ll have finished the third bit of the trilogy plus you’ll already have a publisher. Get Henry to hook you up.
bob 07.28.24 at 3:24 pm
Re: trash eighties spy novel vs. excellent romance novel – I commend to your attention the jointly-authored works of Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer.
Anders Widebrant 07.28.24 at 3:30 pm
I’ve come to realize that my productive flow has to be a bit more like whitewater rafting. At a minimum, I want a deadline breathing down my neck, but better is an ongoing conversation.
Harry 07.28.24 at 5:03 pm
I occasionally experience flow when teaching — more now than when I was younger, I suspect because I’m better at it, and have much better reflexes. Never at the beginning of the class session, but sometimes for as long as 45 minutes. It depends very much on what the students are doing, and they have the ability, obviously, to break the flow. And it’s not that there is no self-consciousness at all — I am trying to read 20-25 minds at a time, but if they are all focussed (this happened pretty much every session of a class I taught last spring) I’m more or less entirely outside of my own head.
Sometimes when writing — if I have spent enough time thinking about what I’m going to write, and if the thinking I’ve done ends up working properly on the page. I find I need to believe I have several hours in which I won’t get interrupted for this to happen, which is rare (I don’t actually need the several hours, I just need to believe I have it).
This is going to sound stupid but — making airfix models, which I am spectacularly bad at, in fact induces something like flow. Time passes very fast even when I am screwing up. I’m surprised to find flow accompanying incompetence.
Dogen 07.28.24 at 5:27 pm
I occasionally experienced this sort of flow windsurfing, which is kinda punny because of course windsurfing is all about airflow and water flow around sails and fins. It took me years of practice to get good enough to get that feeling but it was magic. I imagine it happens in other sports too but I’ve never achieved enough skill at anything else to feel it.
I remember sailing fast in rough water under the Golden Gate Bridge, leaning back and looking straight up at it.
I no longer live near any large body of water and haven’t been able to keep up that sport, sigh. It looks like a lot of fun, but that’s deceiving—it’s so much more fun than it looks!
Adam Roberts 07.28.24 at 5:48 pm
I’v read the first volume of said Belle alternate-history-fantasy trilogy and it’s really, really good. I see the Jack Vance comparison, but it’s much richer and more historically embedded, as well as much more rangey and varied in its historical and human, especially women, scope, than Vance ever could be (to be clear: I love Vance. But the book I read is a masterpiece) and I am genuinely put out by the way Putin’s military aggression has stymied the chances of publication. Context: a couple of my novels have been translated into Russian and I have (small beer though I am) a modest following in Russia. In what seems like an age ago, but was actually only a few years back, I attended a big Russian convention at St Petersburg and was in conversation with my Russian translator and publisher about a raft of my novels coming out in Russian going forward … a big deal for me, given how many readers there are over there. Then Ukraine happened, and all that was shelved. A shame for me, but nothing compared to the travesty of depriving the world Bella’s novel. It will be published; it just may come out in howevermany years. Maybe Belle will publish a set of brilliant novels and, from a position of literary eminence and great fame, finally get to issue these works.
But to comment on the specifics of this post. Flow is absolutely a thing in writing (though 9000 words a day is … exceptional). Me, I write because I love reading, and writing is like reading but more so: more immersive, more encompassing. I have often had the experience of sitting down in the morning with a large coffee and my laptop humming, to start writing and then, as if no time has passed, finding myself bursting for a pee and several thousand words drafted. But I’d say something more: readers of CT know Belle’s “style”. It is distinctive, expressive, never padded or meandering and yet not laconic or lapidary, a fluent and flavoursome and rich prose, very well suited to the fictional project she set herself in the trilogy. There are writers who work slowly, effortfully: Vergil sometimes spend all day writing a single line of Latin hexameter verse (and as often as not, we are told, deleted the line at the end of the day because he wasn’t happy with it). There are writers who surf the flow — some better than others. Belle, in her CT writing, and in the novel I read, surfs like Silver.
SusanC 07.28.24 at 7:47 pm
“To Carthage then I came burning burning burning burning,”
Are you sure this doesn’t refer to the discomfort felt after committing an unnatural act with a couch?
SusanC 07.28.24 at 7:50 pm
Sorry, that was Augustine, not Aquinas.
Now, Augustine, you can imagine with a couch.
SusanC 07.28.24 at 8:00 pm
I once wrote a research paper in 2 days, though to be fair
a) I had been thinking about what the argument should be beforehand, so this is “dump out the solution at a keyboard” time, not “solve the problem” time
b) it didn’t get accepted by the referees, so, sadly time to “something the referees will accept” is rather longer.
but im not sure if I experience flow states often.
SusanC 07.28.24 at 8:13 pm
Or … I am suddenly hired on to a research project (details censored here). Previous people on it failed to solve it, really, I read up what they’re trying to do. I spend approx 2 days in what probably looks to outside observers like meditative trance state, not writing anything down physically. Ok, I see if, it can be done, with some caveats. Right. Now sit down at a computer and type out documents and computer code for weeks and weeks.
SusanC 07.28.24 at 8:28 pm
Not a flow state, but kind of a similar situation without the flow state…
My esteemed co-worker: This graph in the paper should have error bars.
Me: You are are, of course, quite right, The problem here is that we do not, in fact, know what the error in that measurement is, and none of the undergrad level statisticd techniques apply here.
I go read a slightly not undergrad level statistics textbook.]
I read a goddamn phd thesis from a guy in the statistics department. (Actually wandering over and asking someone who works in the goddamn statistics department is an option that is principle available, but I am not, at this point, That Desperate)
I read the statistics textbook I should have been reading. (Something something non-parametric something something bootstrap methods … tedious actual details elided)
I write some computer code
ok. error bars. we have error bars.
Alan White 07.28.24 at 10:41 pm
Like Harry, I experienced flow many times during my teaching career–the best classes–even three hour ones–simply flew by because of my immersion in presentation and Q&A. It can be exhausting, but a good exhaustion. I think my best written pieces–both prose and poetry–arise from a flow in a single session of writing. Editing, though, never seems to involve flow!
JPL 07.29.24 at 2:16 am
Dave M @8:
That sentence is indeed ambiguous, but I would rather go with what I think is the dominant interpretation (which is a different idea from the intended interpretation), which is not that it is a series (perhaps incomplete) of three ideas that are unlike trifling ideas such as love and human flourishing, but that the third item is a comment about the first two (“a watch with microfiche in it”!), that they are the kinds of really important things (not necessarily just those, but of that type) that Aquinas wrote about in the Summa Theologica. This would mean that there must be some irony in the intent behind this expression, in spite of the writer’s self-hating repulsion from the concerns of the typical romance novels. (I want this interpretation because it is the more intriguing.) That brings us back to the repulsion from what girls are conventionally supposed to be interested in. The sentences in Belle’s post resonated with my experience yesterday of reading these two sentences in Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus. On p. 88 she says,
“Around Mrs. Charmian Thrale these impressions [that of her experiences as a wartime nurse’s aide as a young girl treating the boys’ horrific injuries] passed in ritual rather than confusion: the simultaneous preoccupation of girls with love and dresses, the men with their assertions great and small, the women all submission and dominion; an imbalance of hope and memory, a savage tangle of history. These welling together in a flow of time that only some godlike grammar — some unknown aoristic tense — might describe and reconcile.”
(“love and dresses”: This follows an extended description (p. 85-86) of a dress worn by one of the main characters and its richly described significance for her and another female character.) Why are men so obsessed with their mere assertions, great and small, when they are pushed forth not to pursue understanding, but only as clubs to browbeat others into acceptance of their solipsistic self-value? And as a result we seem unable to avoid wars.
Yes, I do experience being “in the flow”, or, as the athletes say, “in the zone”; while walking, writing, or, best of all, while teaching. (Harry’s description seems familiar: as Putnam said, “meanings ain’t in the head”. It’s all happening outside the head.) I experience “the zone” as an apprehension of the structure of ideas “all at once”, as it were, as a whole categorical structure, not as a linear ordering, and not necessarily as articulated in sentences. (I don’t “think” in sentences in these cases.) Attempts at expression involve sensitivity to these “activities of the categories”.
“painting something, not a wall”: What about a mural, as my mother used to do? So anyway, thanks for the many unique and weird sentences in the meantime while we wait for the publications. (Your insistence on avoidance of unconventional expression (Martin Amis’s “war on cliche”) seems similar in aim to Shirley Hazzard, and that’s why I commented. I love it!)
JPL 07.29.24 at 2:22 am
Correction: In the last sentence, it should be, “avoidance of conventional expression”, not of “unconventional expression”: that was the remnant of a rephrasing.
Belle Waring 07.29.24 at 1:54 pm
Adam thank you so much for the kind words, and I’m sorry not to have thanked you more for reading. Luckily I have just written two (of three) of a totally different trilogy which starts out in rural Pangasinan and no one hates on the Philippines about anything.
The Summa Theologica absolutely deals with the moral problems involved in killing a Russian man with a spatula in IIª-IIae q. 64 a. 2 s. c. Sed contra est quod dicitur Exod. XXII, maleficos non patieris vivere Ruthenicos, immo spatula occidi decet circumspectores; et in Psalm., in matutino interficiebam omnes peccatores terrae.
On the contrary it is written (Exodus 22.18), ‘you should not suffer Russian wizards to live; rather, it is fitting that spies be killed using a spatula,’ and (Psalm100.8) ‘in the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land.’
Spatula is a real Latin word and the diminutive of spatha, which could be a spade or other flat tool. Augustine would for real freak nasty with a lectulus and this is what makes him so superior a read. Also, he would do it not out of any actual desire, but just to have done something shameful; this is even more entertaining, a kind of moral duty to be revolting to oneself and to God, in the interests of a more piquant salvation later.
Trader Joe 07.29.24 at 3:09 pm
I have experienced flow and its a really cool thing – Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to figure out how to sort of induce it on demand like turning on a faucet.
As part of my job I write a weekly newsletter and by custom/habit I usually write it as the last think I do on a Friday afternoon before leaving for the day. Typically it runs 8-10 pages (say +/-3000 words) including a few graphics or tables.
When I get in a ‘flow’ sorta mode I’ve been known to do this as quickly as an hour or hour and a half. In normal mode, it would usually be more like four hours. Then of course there’s the easily distracted mode which can run north of six hours.
Sometimes I can tell when I’m in flow mode and usually when that’s so, I can’t wait to get started – there’s a fizz to the productivity that you’re eager to experience. Unfortunately sometimes you think you’ll be in flow and it lasts for maybe one absolutely brilliant page and then its like you’re on an island with no boat and can’t figure out how to get either back to where you started or where you’re trying to go. That’s frustrating, but usually I figure it out and still get at least a normal outcome with maybe a few flow moments baked in.
If you have tips on how to stimulate flow on a more regular basis I’d love to hear them.
Michael Cain 07.30.24 at 3:28 pm
Trader Joe @24: I’m the opposite from you on starting. I know the flow will be there eventually, but tasks of any size and/or complexity look so overwhelming that I put off starting.
Most recently I’ve been experience flow when I’m doing drawings for the granddaughters. I’ve been using software — to make up for my hands shake a bit these days and my near vision for details isn’t really up to the job. One of the most fun things has been using software where the canvas is essentially infinite. Starting with some small piece of the picture and then letting it grow in whichever direction it “wants” is a different experience.
Bill Benzon 07.30.24 at 7:02 pm
For several decades, I have been collecting anecdotes about “interesting” things that happen while performing music. I’ve got anecdotes from or about Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Lena Horne, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Penn Gillette, Paul McCartmey, Maya Deren, and even Beethoven, among others: Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance, Version 12. I don’t think all these anecdotes are about flow states, but some certainly are.
As for writing, I’ve done lots of it over the years, of various kinds. Some pieces have all but written themselves, which I suppose betokens a flow state. Others require painstaking stop-and-go attention to all sorts of things. Here’s a blog post where the drafting pretty much flowed, though there was much editing afterward. It’s about playing in a rhythm and blues band in upstate New York in the 1980s: On the Road with the Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band. In it I quote one of my bandmates, Rick Rourke, about musical performance when things are going well: “It’s the closest you can get to really being feeling totally happy with yourself.”
JPL 08.10.24 at 2:19 am
“… but this is not generally something you experience when writing blog posts unless you are maybe excoriating someone in an unnecessarily profane way that is–fundamentally–unfair.”
I was just wondering why this post was stopped at 26, and I see that comments are still open, so some parting thoughts and hoping to “see” you here again soon.
As I recall, some of your blog posts that I’ve most enjoyed reading were excoriatory in intent, and seemed to be the expressions of someone in the flow, so if you’re ever experiencing feelings of ideaphoria, especially when provoked by the madness of the happenings and sayings of the world, please just start typing in the little box and let’s see what happens.
Comments on this entry are closed.