In the Flow

Navigating the braided river of writing

Dear fellow writer,

I created this paper collage several years ago while in a state of flow, happily immersed in the challenge of visually representing the concept of flow in all its beauty and complexity. I started with an aerial photograph of a braided river, then layered meandering channels of marbled blue paper over hand-inked text and patterned paper invoking geological and botanical forms. 

But what is flow, anyway? And what do we really mean when we talk about flow in writing?

The answer, like a braided river, has many interwoven strands.

Flow as optimal experience

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously defined flow as a deep absorption in any task that lies just beyond the limits of our abilities, neither so easy that we find it boring nor so challenging that we find it impossible:

It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair, when the boat lunges through the waves like a colt—sails, hull, wind, and sea humming a harmony that vibrates in the sailor’s veins. It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator. . . . The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

(Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 3, 16)

According to Csikszentmihalyi, anyone can learn to enter a state of flow more or less at will. You just have to set up the right conditions:

1. The task must be one that you can complete.

2. You have the time and space to concentrate on what you are doing.

3. The task has clear goals.

4. The task provides immediate feedback that confirms your progress.

5. The task inspires deep but effortless involvement.

6. The task allows you a sense of control over your actions.

7. While undertaking the task, your sense of self temporarily disappears, only to reemerge later, paradoxically, as a deeper sense of self.

8. Your sense of time is altered, so that hours pass like minutes and minutes like hours.

But even when all of these conditions are in place, the flow of writing can remain elusive — more like a magic spring guarded by a fickle muse than a steady stream of words to be turned on or off on demand.

The opposite of flow is frustration, an emotion well known to academic writers, who often invoke metaphors of intestinal blockages (“constipation”), plumbing blockages (“a feeling of being clogged”), and blocked waterways (“stuck in the quagmire of detail”) to describe how they feel when their sentences aren’t flowing. When we talk about “writer’s block,” perhaps what we really mean is the absence of flow.

Flow as effortless production

The problem here, I believe, is that writers tend to conflate Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow with the easy flow of perfectly formed sentences onto the waiting page.

In fact, you can be “in flow” at any stage of the writing process: not just when your words are flowing freely but also when you’re deeply absorbed in tasks such as brainstorming, mind-mapping, pre-writing, or polishing. Even a “quagmire of detail” can become a space for intellectual flow.

Flow, in other words, is best understood as a state of mind (what Csikszentmihalyi calls “optimal experience”), not a mode of production. And yet, when we talk about flow in writing, somehow we can’t help picturing a flowing river of ink, a rushing torrent of words.

Flow as friction-free reading

To complicate matters, readers often praise well-crafted writing by exclaiming how beautifully it “flows.”

Of course, as any serious writer knows, the more fluid and readable your sentences, the longer they probably took you to write:

A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

(W. B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”)

Flow requires friction. To adapt a metaphor from Bertolt Brecht:

We call the rushing river powerful;
but let us not forget the power of the riverbed.

(Bertolt Brecht, “Über die Gewalt”)

The braided river of flow

If you dream of dwelling permanently in the flow of optimal experience, producing writing that waterfalls without impediment onto the page and thence into your reader’s grateful brain — well, my friend, good luck to you! But even if you were to achieve your fantasy, how long would you really want to ride that eternally cresting wave?

The creative process, like a braided river, is a delicate ecosystem prone to both silting and flooding. As writers, we can find flow in both the silt and the flood: in contemplative silence, in the rush of new words, and in all the muddy places in between.

If you enjoyed this post, I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment, share it with your friends, drop me a restack — or at least toss a heart into the flow.

Kia pai tō koutou rā (have a great day) – and keep on writing!

Helen

Parts of today’s newsletter were adapted from my 2021 blog post In the Flow and my 2023 book Writing with Pleasure (chapter 8).

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