Bringing Forth the Words

A review of Writing in Flow: Keys to Enhanced Creativity by Susan K. Perry, Ph.D.

[Writer's Digest Books, F&W Publications, Inc., Cincinnati, 1999]

Writing in Flow addresses the elusive phenomenon of "writer's high." Many writers will want to buy this book to help them achieve and maintain a sense of flow in their own work.

Dr. Susan Perry, a social psychologist and writer, dishes up an easily digestible analysis of flow, from what it is to how to make it happen, even when staring the writer's goblin – writer’s block – square in the face. This groundbreaking book is built around interviews with more than 75 best-selling and award-winning writers, in which the authors reveal their techniques for enhancing their writing creativity and productivity.

Susan Perry describes flow as "a delightfully enjoyable state you enter when you're so deeply immersed in whatever you're doing, that you forget yourself and everything around you. It feels as though the words are just coming by themselves, effortlessly. One of the hallmarks of flow is being oblivious to the passage of time. You look up from your work and realize that three hours have slipped by."

For writers, flow comes when they completely lose themselves in the bringing forth of words. Time, commitments, bills, car problems, all these melt into irrelevance. Words simply spring forth from infinite possibility into whole stories filled with emotions, characters, fragrant roses, corpses putrescent, all seemingly undreamt of and without assistance. This "writer's high" is one of the most satisfying aspects of writing, and, according to Perry’s focus group, one of the most difficult to achieve.

I, as someone who can sit down at the wordprocessor and vanish from self-consciousness for hours at a time, was more interested in an explanation of what exactly this disappearing act is, how it works, and how to achieve it more predictably.

Despite beginning as a doctoral thesis, Writing in Flow: Keys to Enhanced Creativity is an interesting and practical contribution to the practice of writing. I say this with admiration. It is extremely difficult to write anything that will satisfy a thesis committee yet be resuscitated, even with the most heroic of methods, into something readable and applicable to everyday life. I know this from reading a great many theses and writing a couple of my own.

While credit for this feat is partly attributable to Dr. Susan Perry’s writing facility, she can also take credit for knowing when a topic is ripe for study. Ever since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s books, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement in Everyday Life, creative people have been captivated by the "flow" experience.

Perry says she studied the relationship between flow and writing because: "Flow feels so good, and is such an amazing place to write from, that I wanted to know more about it. Besides, my husband, a poet who works in the room right next to mine, gets into flow very easily, in writing and in everything. It's much harder for me and I wanted to learn to make it easier."

Basically, flow is a state of consciousness in which you become so deeply immersed in what you are doing that you lose all sense of time and place; you become completely immersed in the task at hand. In short, you lose self-consciousness. Some writers describe the experience in mystical terms, describing words as coming forth effortlessly onto the page almost as if being dictated, yet without a sense of a someone who is dictating. They frequently mention "awakening" hours later to find that they haven’t taken lunch or dinner and it is dark outside; and, almost mysteriously, there sits before them evidence of a hard day’s work.

That is what Writing in Flow is all about – helping writers take Csikszentmihalyi’s insights and theoretical constructs with them to their writing. Dr. Perry offers an in-depth analysis of how to fuel this creative process and get beyond the self-consciousness that can generate "writer’s block" and get to the "no-I" state ("no-mind" in Zen terms), a flow state where the writer can step aside and let the stories by. Although the book is not otherworldly by design, you may find flow sounding very mystical. In fact, Dr. Perry says, "Flow is a carefully researched psychological state that anyone can learn to enjoy more often. Transcendence for the masses, if you will."

If I had to summarize the book, I would say it is the repository of practical paths to facilitating the flow state. Here they are:
• Open to experience. You would think writers would have a natural understanding and affinity for that but I have writing friends who are as inflexible as concrete.
• Cultivate a powerful reason for writing. Having a purpose makes the task less a chore than an opportunity: a labor of love fueled by passion makes persistence easier. A daredevil like Evel Kneivel isn’t put off hurdles and obstacles; they are the raison d’être for what he does. Don’t get me wrong, this is not one of those silly positive-thinking books. It’s just that having a darn good reason to write will convert obstacles into a raison d’être for what you do. Rather than ask how you can get into the flow state, remind yourself why you write.
• Find ways to alternate between relaxation and focus. Perry asked her interviewees to describe what they do and don’t do that gets them so much "in the mood" to write that flow will follow.
• Learn to accept the opposites and paradoxes inherent in writing. You need to be aware of audience but being obsessed with it stunts your writing. Sometimes you can only exercise control over your writing by surrendering to it. Sometimes you can only get inspired by willing yourself to write. The list goes on.

If it were only a list, it would get monotonous. It is not. I think most writers will enjoy the panel- discussion format of this book. Actually, it’s more like a round table than a panel discussion. Better yet, it’s more like sitting in a huge booth at a café with 76 writers you can not help but admire. Just as you might imagine in such a gathering of lively, independent, creative minds, you can only agree on the importance of the topic. The details of getting there vary from one writer to the next. And that is why this book feels real. There is no phony-baloney secret formula to success. You quickly realize that, yes, this phenomenon exists and it is important but there are at least 76 ways of getting there.

As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says in his foreword to Writing in Flow, many creative types have left us "vivid insights into the subjective experience of writing. Yet to my knowledge nobody has asked a large number of distinguished authors to describe how they think and what they feel during the creative process, so as to provide a comprehensive and systematic description of the art of writing."

That is no longer true. This accessible and useful book brings the insights of some of our most creative and powerful minds to your doorstep.

Oh, and a little frosting on the cake: It turns out that the flow state can be called upon to enhance, shall we say, less cerebral activities as well.

-- RLM
©1999 Rodney L. Merrill

Susan Perry holds a Ph.D. in social psychology and teaches psychology and writing at Woodbury University. She is the author of Fun Time, Family Time and the award-winning Playing Smart. Perry has also written more than 700 articles, mostly on psychology and child development for publications such as USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Parenting, Woman's World and Working World. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Associate Editor Rodney Merrill is author of over 400 articles encompassing reviews of books, magazines, e-zines, and educational video; personal essay, narrative nature essay; poetry; and feature-length articles on distance education, biomedical ethics, health and fitness, environmental issues, practical psychology, rural living skills, and cooking. He lives in Astoria, Oregon, where he operates a rapidly growing degrees-by- distance learning consultant service called DegreeFindersSM [http://www.DegreeFinders.com], which finds distance-learning degree programs to match client needs.