Reading time: About 3 minutes
Writing flow isn’t luck. Try five ways to invite it, from shrinking the job to stopping while you still know what comes next.
Back in my newspaper days, I sometimes wrote my best stories with a deadline of 40 minutes and an editor hovering behind my chair like an expectant father in a 1950s movie.
The words poured out. I had no time to second-guess myself, and by the time I looked up, the story was filed and my coffee had gone cold.
I didn’t have a name for it then, but I was in flow.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced MEE-hy CHEEK-sent-mee-hy-ee) spent decades studying that state, which he described as total absorption in a task, the kind where time bends and your self-consciousness packs up and goes home.
You’ve felt it yourself if you’ve ever looked up from the page to find two hours has vanished. Of course, Instagram can make two hours vanish too, but it produces far fewer finished chapters.
Happily, flow isn’t reserved for a lucky few. You can’t force it to show up, but you can set the table so it’s more likely to arrive on its own.
1-Make the job the right size
Csikszentmihalyi found that flow arrives when the difficulty of a task roughly matches your skill. If the job is too hard, you get anxious, and if it’s too easy, you get bored. Goldilocks understood the principle, although she applied it mainly to porridge and trespassing.
Many writers get this backwards because when they feel stuck, they assume they need to push harder. But stuck usually means the job is too big. “Write chapter four” describes a daunting job, and nobody does that in a single morning. “Write the scene where the dean finds the missing grant money,” is something you can finish before lunch.
And if you’re bored rather than anxious, make the job harder by setting a timer for 15 minutes and seeing how many words you can get down before the timer rings.
2-Close the loops before you open the document
In 2009, a business professor named Sophie Leroy coined the term “attention residue.” When we switch tasks, part of the brain stays behind on the old one, like a guest who won’t leave the party. So, if you check email at 8:55 and start writing at 9 a.m., a slice of your mind is still composing a reply to your department chair. (He can wait.)
Leroy and her colleague Theresa Glomb later tested a fix that takes about a minute: before you switch tasks, jot a note about where you left off and what you plan to do next. In their studies, the people who wrote this “ready-to-resume” plan let go of the first job and performed better on the second.
So, write one for your inbox before your writing session, and then close the thing. Really close it.
3-Never stop to look things up
Flow rarely survives the moment you realize you need a date or a name and open a browser to hunt for it. An hour later, you’re four clicks deep into the history of the paper clip, wondering how you got there.
Instead, borrow a trick from the newsroom and type “TK,” which is journalist shorthand for “to come,” then keep going. Editors picked those two letters because they almost never sit side by side in English, which makes them easy to search for later. When your session ends, hunt down every TK in one batch.
The trick works for missing words too. Can’t think of the perfect verb? TK. You can hunt for it later, when your editing brain clocks in for its shift.
4-Hide your words from your inner editor
Your inner editor is the reason you write one sentence and then spend 10 minutes rewriting it, so take away its view.
Turn the brightness on your monitor down until the screen is nearly black, or set your font size to 3 pt. You’ll make typos, loads of them, but that’s fine, because typing blind forces you forward instead of letting you circle back to buff the same sentence like a nervous jeweller. If you type with two fingers, the result may resemble a ransom note. Carry on anyway.
This is my favourite way to keep writing and editing separate, and I’ve been beating that drum for 25 years. They’re different jobs that need different brains, and doing both at once means doing neither well.
5-Stop while you still know what comes next
Attention residue can work in your favour, too. If unfinished jobs cling to the mind, why not aim that stickiness at your manuscript instead of your inbox?
End each writing session mid-paragraph at a spot where you know exactly what you want to say next and jot a word or two as a reminder. Tomorrow you’ll sit down and finish that thought straight away, and the momentum will carry you into the next one before your inner critic has even found its reading glasses.
It’s like parking your car on a hill so you get a rolling start the next morning.
Flow fits into small spaces
Writers often assume flow requires a long, empty afternoon with nothing on the calendar, but I’ve seen them slip into it during a 15-minute session while their kids fought over the last waffle in the next room.
Flow needs only two things: a job you can actually do and a mind that has stopped chewing on email. Give yourself both, and the clock will take care of itself.
Then one day soon you’ll look up from your desk and discover that your coffee has gone cold.
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Flow is much easier to find when someone is expecting your words. That’s the engine behind Get it Done, my three-month accountability and writing coaching program. You’ll set right-sized daily goals and get help from me whenever you’re stuck. (No hovering newspaper editor required, although I do a convincing impression.) Enrolment closes this Thursday, Oct. 22, and after that the group is closed until Feb. 1. Learn more and sign up.
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My video podcast last week described the benefits of writing for just one person. You can watch the video or read the transcript, and you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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How do you achieve writing flow? We can all learn from each other, so please, share your thoughts with my readers and me. To share, please scroll down to the comments, directly underneath the related posts links, below. You don’t have to join Disqus to post! Read my tutorial to learn how to post as a guest. (It’s easy!)
