Creative Elation: the State of Flow

And not just for writers!

Dear Loyal Readers,

Elizabeth and Barbara: After over 9 months of talking, writing, editing, and posting, we have decided to take a break from Substack. First, we want to thank you for letting us into your inbox and reading our newsletter. We are truly grateful for your support.

Elizabeth: For me, it has been a great adventure. Co-writing and using the Substack platform were entirely new endeavors. Most thrilling, though, was acquiring an exciting new way of thinking about my mind as brain-based.

But despite all that I continue to love about exploring these topics with Barbara, producing our posts has remained very demanding. The fun is starting each post, not knowing what will emerge. But the not-knowing brings with it much hard work. We need a break.

Barbara: We have been deeply gratified when readers have told us that they enjoyed our posts, learned something new, or began to think somewhat differently.

For me, whatever writing project I’m working on takes residence in my brain, leaving little extra room for other manuscripts. I have three projects waiting in the wings that I will now have time for.

This is our last post, at least for now. But, we want to end on a high note. And so we’re devoting this final post to a state of mind that can come with writing and that has been described as a feeling of elation — flow.

created on Night Cafe Studio

Elizabeth: When Barbara first mentioned the state of flow as a topic for this week, I knew little about it. I didn’t realize, for example, that it was the same state of mind that athletes call “being in the zone.”

Barbara: Flow was first identified — and the term coined — in the 1970s by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist who was interested in happiness, and specifically in ecstatic states. He interviewed musicians, artists, athletes, and CEOs, people who had highly developed skills and engaged in their work for the love of it. Many of these people described experiencing a somewhat altered mental state during which their high-level of functioning felt effortless and also intensely pleasurable. Time disappeared for them. They felt as though their work was “flowing,” hence the name he chose.

Elizabeth: My first thought about flow as Csikszentmihalyi described it was that it resembled Samuel Coleridge’s famous experience writing his poem Kubla Khan. But without the opium. Coleridge claimed the lines of poetry emerged from a drug-induced dream which he simply transcribed, until the arrival of a visitor disrupted his state of mind, and the rest was lost.

I can’t help being impressed that the altered state of mind that is flow is induced by intense focus.

Barbara: Well, the intense focus of meditation also induces an altered state of mind, although a different one. Drugs aren’t the only path.

Flow happens under specific conditions to people who are experts and devoted to their work, whatever it is. It is described as occurring when there is a merger of action and awareness that leads to a total absorption and loss of self-consciousness. The individual is performing at a high level of functioning and feels in effortless control.

Here is how the writer Jonathan Lethem described his writing process in an interview with Literary Hub:

The process is typically one of brief outbursts of writing in the course of long spells of reading, cooking, housecleaning, playing computer chess, watching Mets games, and so forth. Then again, sometimes time inverts like a sock, and I discover that it was light out and now it is dark, and seven innings of the Mets game have gone by without my registering what happened, because I was writing. Or there’s nothing to eat because I didn’t cook, or the laundry rotted in the washer for three days.

Sounds like flow!

Elizabeth: I haven’t had Lethem’s experience, but I’m quite sure I’ve had my own version. Actually, I think I may be in “intermittent flow” quite often, but there have been a few times when it lasted through a whole first draft that then needed very little editing.

Barbara: Can you describe it?

Elizabeth: Once, it happened when I was writing about a family upheaval of a year earlier. At the height of Covid, my daughter was hospitalized for six weeks with frightening symptoms, and I found myself the caretaker of my 2-year-old grandson, forty years after having last changed a diaper. The challenge that writing the story presented was to find a way to balance the hilarity of my ineptitude — which was being transmitted through nanny cams to my daughter in the hospital, via her cell — with the terror of her condition.

Before getting to my morning writing, I’d made a quick run to the supermarket and was parking my car, when the final words of the unwritten piece suddenly flashed in my mind. Later, when I started to write, the story unspooled in one, glorious go. It seemed to tell itself, as though someone else was hitting the keys. And it led perfectly to the predetermined last line.

Not only that, but I heard myself writing in a voice that I might have used had I been telling the story to a group of friends who were empathic with my emotional turmoil and wanted to hear more. Nothing could have been more natural, more effortless. There was a perfect, joyful fusion between my deepest self and my writing-self.

Barbara: Many things may have contributed to your writing that story so fluidly. You had likely worked out the essay without conscious awareness before beginning to write. And the description of your imagined audience suggests the fulfillment of a deep desire.

Elizabeth: Let’s break down the definition of flow. A flow state isn’t just total immersion with an accompanying loss of a sense of time and of self-awareness. That could describe watching a movie or daydreaming while folding laundry. There has to be intense attention to an activity, and the skilled task has to be difficult (demanding performance at the highest level) but attainable (or there’d be no sense of ease). Lastly, there needs to be a goal, not a long-term goal, but rather one that provides real-time feedback of success.

In flow, you and the work are one. Rather than walking — or slogging — you are almost flying. The flow state is not only extremely pleasurable, but it is also intrinsically rewarding and may come with feelings of meaning and purpose.

I once listened to four young surgeons describing their amazement at being able to operate for 6 hours or more, with no sense at all that any time had passed. I realize now that they were describing flow.

Barbara: Very likely. I think there is another necessary element, though, which is that the individual has to be personally engaged, has to care deeply about the work.

Elizabeth: To get more information about the experience of flow-states, Susan Perry researched a cohort of 75 acclaimed poets and fiction writers, using a questionnaire. Here is the response of fiction writer Ursula le Guin:

[It] seems to me to be the condition in which all skilled work is done — work one has learned how to do so that the concrete aspects of it have become automatic — including muscular coordination and total familiarity with the medium (whether the medium be paint, or basket-withes or a dancer's own body or, for a writer, word-sound, syntax, etc.).

Le Guin objects to repeated use of the words ‘flow state’, arguing that they “tend to reify a psychic state or set of states which is in fact extremely elusive, subtle, varied, complex.” I think she’s captured the variability of the experience. It is not the same for everyone who experiences it.

Barbara: Here is how the poet David Hall answered her questionnaire:

I have the experience every day of losing track of time, though I do not want to be represented as having agreed that it is “flow”…

In writing prose, sometimes I can scratch away…for a while and then feel suddenly that I am hot—this is the closest thing to “flow”—and then write with greater speed and greater excitement for a while. Usually, these passages—passages written under this condition—need more cutting (mania?) but less rewriting for color.

Elizabeth: That sounds familiar.

And the le Guin’s quote about automatized skilled work (above) is followed by something else that I find illuminating. In fact, she addressed a question I’ve had about the connection between performing the craft aspects of the task at a peak of ability and simultaneously reaching a creative high. How does the first affect the occurrence of the second?

The only decisions a skilled artisan or artist makes are aesthetic ones. Since aesthetic decisions are not rational ones, they are made on a level that doesn’t coincide with rational consciousness. Many artists feel that they are in something resembling a trance state while working, and that the decisions the work involves are not made by them but by the work.

Le Guin seems to be suggesting that by automatizing as much as possible the act of the task at hand, you free your mind to be its most creative. That makes sense. The craft part is always pretty automatic; but when you’re in flow, the more creative parts of the task are also without conscious control.

So what has neurology learned about the flow state?

Barbara: In reading through the scientific literature on flow, one thing is clear. Flow is very hard to study. And this isn’t surprising. It’s difficult to imagine how one might enter a state of flow within an MRI scanner! Mostly, researchers have relied on self-reports, including questionnaires, but what we can learn from these is limited, as they are after-the-fact recollections of a state of mind during which self-awareness itself is impacted.

Researchers do seem to agree that neurologically, there is a shift from neural systems that support explicit behavior (or what is experienced as consciously motivated) to systems that support implicit or procedural behavior (body memory and actions).

However, there are two reigning neurological theories to explain flow. One theory holds that frontal systems of control and self-monitoring are relatively inhibited during the flow state. This notion would align with individuals reporting that they feel less awareness of self and less separate from the activity.

The other theory is that there is more synchronicity across multiple brain regions and more efficiency, which could translate into the subjective feelings of effortlessness and elation that are reported. Of course, there may be truth to each of these theories.

And, as far as I know, no one has really studied the actual, on the ground experience of flow in writers. Do all writers experience flow? Is it more common with fiction than nonfiction writers? Do different writers have unique patterns of flow states?

Elizabeth: So, we’re ending with questions.

Barbara: That seems appropriate, don’t you think? We started our newsletter with your question about the psychological transformation that resulted from the writing of your memoir. But, before we could address that particular question, many others arose. Questions are a driving force. They lead to exploration, to new territory, to new ideas. Questions are much more powerful than answers.

Elizabeth: And perhaps, sometime in the future, we’ll return to take up my original question.