Cheeks Sent Me High
Folks, a couple of weeks ago we celebrated International Pennebaker Day, which has nothing to do with baked pasta, and which, for some reason, still lacks proper international recognition.
Today, and in that same uplifting spirit, we celebrate International Csikszentmihalyi Day. The word in between “international” and “day” may look like a really terrible attempt at an anagram, or what happens when a Slovakian and a choose to double-barrel their surnames, or just what you get when you put a couple of alphabets into an ordinary domestic liquidiser and hit the Blitz button.
In fact, of course, the name is (a) an example of a nice, straightforward Hungarian name, and (b) one belonging to the US-Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (roughly, “Cheeks Sent Me High”).
Csikszentmihalyi is best known for his work on flow, a mental/emotional state that’s characterised by total immersion in the activity concerned. He says the state takes place when you are:
“Completely involved in an activity for its own sake. 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.”
Writers achieve this state. So do painters and musicians. But sportspeople do as well. I’ve known it, myself, when rock-climbing, but I imagine that the followers of other, lesser sports feel it too.
When Emma Raducanu says of her US Open win, ‘At one point mid-game, I just let my racket go because I just didn’t believe I made that shot,’ you sense the presence of flow in action. That shot wasn’t exactly the consequence of a consciously willed action, but nor was it involuntary or unconscious.
Csikszentmihalyi elaborates the state thus:
- Complete concentration on the task;
- Clarity of goals and reward in mind and immediate feedback;
- Transformation of time (speeding up/slowing down);
- The experience is intrinsically rewarding;
- Effortlessness and ease;
- There is a balance between challenge and skills;
- Actions and awareness are merged, losing self-conscious rumination;
- There is a feeling of control over the task.
I’ve known all of that when writing. Most often when writing fiction, but I’ve certainly known it with non-fiction too. I get it (a bit) when I write these Friday emails.
The merging of actions and awareness is certainly a leading feature for me. So too is the intrinsic reward. So is the complete concentration. So is the loss of time.
When I write, time just vanishes. I can easily miss an appointment by an hour and feel amazed, because I thought I still had ages to go. More weirdly, when I’ve been at peak fitness, I’ve felt it rock-climbing. I’ve had the sense of jumping for a hold and – instead of my normal desperate, failing lunge – I’ve found that I’ve had more time to locate and grasp the hold than I expected. When I see really good climbers climb, the thing that always strikes me isn’t how much stronger they are, but how much more time they always seem to have.
Now, I don’t think you really need me to tell you about flow, because I’m pretty sure you already feel it and understand it from within. So here are some further thoughts or questions that occur to me:
Do you have to have flow to write?
Once you’ve experienced flow, it may seem that it’s the only way to generate quality words on the page. That if you’re not in flow, you should just walk the dogs or fix a shelf or perform some other displacement activity until you feel ready to try again.
I don’t think that’s right, or at least it’s only about half right.
I strongly suspect that a book written entirely by force of will and without the aid of flow won’t ever be entirely satisfying. It may have craft, but won’t have magic, and without the magic, honestly, what’s the point? That’s why I always have a mental reservation about the 2,000-words-a-day brigade, those folks who point out that you should be able to write a 100K thriller in two months, even allowing a bit of time off along the way.
But at the same time, the single best way to bump-start your writing is simply: write.
If you feel locked out of writing, then just forcing yourself to do it – going through the motions, if you like – is still the best way to unlock that inner blockage. That approach has worked often enough for me in the past. If you feel any blockage at the moment, then the same basic approach will work for you.
(Except that if days and weeks go by and you’re still not feeling right, you need to question things more broadly. Is all well in your life? Maybe there’s some deeper issue that needs addressing. Or is all well with the book? Maybe your inability to get into it is because there is some fundamental issue with the project that you need to acknowledge and tackle directly. Writing, like caustic soda, solves most things, but …)
Can a reader tell the difference between flow-words and non-flow words?
I tend to know, even years afterwards, which pages of a book came awkwardly for me and which came smoothly. It’s as though I still feel the ghost of that early awkwardness haunting the text.
At the same time, I can honestly say that no agent, editor or reader has ever called attention to those patches and suggested that they’re lesser than the rest. I think a book needs, as far as possible, to be written in a flow state, because that’s what lets the magic in, but once the magic is there, it disperses through the text. There may be better scenes or worse scenes, but magic is a quality that adheres (or not) to a book as a whole.
In short: if some scenes just come awkwardly and brutishly onto the page, you don’t need to worry about it. No one else will ever know.
Editing can be a flow state too
For me, this is critical.
Actual writing probably brings the greatest joy. (My very greatest joys have been placing my character in extended peril. Oh, how I loved almost freezing Fiona to death in the Black Mountains. I adored bricking her up at the side of a church in the Brecon Beacons. And I had a rare and deep joy when I sank a trawler, with her on board, in the midst of an Atlantic gale.)
That said, editing has always been a deep, absorbing pleasure for me. I think writers should train themselves to expect flow in editing as well as writing. The rewards of editing are a little different and, OK, perhaps a little shallower too, but they are real for all that.
I love editing so much, it’s always a little grief to hand over a book. I’d like to spend more time with it. If you don’t find editing utterly absorbing, it’s almost certain that you’re cutting corners you don’t really want to cut.
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That’s it from me. I’m on holiday next week – as in, really, truly, on a beach somewhere warm – so you won’t get a real email from me. You’re going to get a short “best of selection” that you can sneer at, then tear to shreds.
Normal service will resume the week after that.
Oh yes, and the header photo on this page? That’s not me. It’s James Pearson on The Quarryman, which is the most dazzlingly beautiful climb in the UK – and about a million miles beyond my pay grade. In my next life, I’m going to come back with the balance of a ballet dancer and forearms like Pop-Eye. I once met Jonny Dawes, the revolutionary who first climbed The Quarryman and I almost fainted with adulation. He’s a god.
Hi Harry, love your post, as always! I’ve been on farmwatch duties for a couple of weeks, so haven’t done much writing. (I did manage a short story about a baby dragon! The dogs loved it.) So, back to the rockface!
I used to do a bit years ago, mostly in the Peaks, but sometimes in Wales. Great fun, I loved it, but alas I’m not as fit as I once was 🙁
Have a good holiday!
Kathy
Someone over fifty is going to say it, so I may as well. That altered state of flow certainly has echoes of Zen and missing from the list, except implicitly, is the role of practice. Classically the repetition of, say, drawing the bow in archery, means that eventually you can do it practically unconsciously. In many professions it is called clinical intuition or some-such. A fireman takes one look at the blaze and figures out where the origin might be and where to go in safely-because she or he has done it before, over, and over again.
Isn’t that plain old experience? Well, yes and no. There’s pretty strong evidence that there are two distinct ways of thinking. At least two. System one and system two*. The first, like driving or riding a bike is flow-based intuitive work. System two is problem based and needs conscious analytical thought. The risk issue, is that when system two – the facts based analytical process takes over, or has to take over – system one practically stops. Eyes dilate. peripheral vision vanishes. That’s why phones in cars are dangerous – not the physical manipulation of them -but the content of the conversation. If it’s about the weather – no problem. If it’s about the divorce arrangements, turning right at a busy junction (left in America) is dangerous. I don’t use blue-tooth.
The lesson I get from this is exactly what Harry has said – that you have to make yourself practice writing by doing it, over and over again- but cherish the flow whilst you have it and don’t try to edit at the same time, as Khaneman shows, that by doing so you directly interfere with the automatic, intuitive process. (He first noticed this when he observed that most people stop walking if asked to times 17 by 23 in their heads).
So write like the wind – then (next day perhaps) the edit comes in – the system two, rational pulling apart and ritual yanking out of adverbs. I like it best when the two systems collide. I wrote the following nonsensical line in my MS this week under flow conditions – and my rational system 2 head is at total war with it: “What does that mean!” says my system two head, indignant. Not even a question.
‘I dialled Maddy’s number.
‘Do you know what time it is?’
Her voice had all the stretched-out honey of waking from sleep. I wanted to be next to her. Imagined those curls on the pillow.’
But my system one says – it’s not what it means-it’s what my character feels dummy. I’ve no idea whether Jekyl or Hyde will win.
(just another Harry)
*see work by Daniel Khaneman – Nobel Prize Winer
Hi, Harry. This is the first time I have posted as a rather newish member — longtime reader of your newsletter. I like your discussion of flow — a bit like the Muse takes over and helps with the heavy lifting. I am longtime writer and editor and I agree with you that editing, for me, can put me into that state, just as writing does. I am currently taking an online writing course with the writer/playwright/comedian Ann Randolph. (A-plus). It is via Zoom. Each day, we tune into Zoom room and spend 40 minutes or so writing. Flow comes faster when it is given a dedicated time, I think. The phenomenon of Flow may be the reason many people write — better high than with a drug! All best. Mo (Maureen) Conlan, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
Jane Austen’s version she mentioned in Pride and Prejudice she called aneosis – to sink into the feeling – where nothing else matters.
Am currently on my 3rd edit and I get that Csikszentmihalyi regularly – then I realise I have to be somewhere by a given time – time has flown again – late again! Promising myself to block out a whole day – so that I can write, edit and get that Cheeks Sent Me High moment, although really its hours, could be up to 24 of them, condensed into a moment.
I’ve just got one thing to say about that rock climbing OMG! (or is that 3).
Look forward to and enjoy your newsletters.
Have a great holiday Harry – all the best
Harry, thank you for your insights into the state of flow. Even though I’ve experienced flow, it appears spontaneously, and I can’t predict it. I’ve conducted research into the mechanisms of flow but found there’s no agreed trigger for the phenomena. Getting into flow is considered both an art and a science, yet there’s not much science out there. Would be an amazing benefit to a writer if they could just click into flow whenever they needed.
I love that you included flow in editing. As a time pressed (so far) commercially unsuccessful writer I have to fit in writing where and when I can so I’m fully signed up to the ‘get it done then get it good’ school. Editing is where I really get to feel the flow, so much so that, for me, it’s a far more satisfying part of the creative process. But maybe I’m just weird.
Interesting views this week. Thanks for sharing. I think we as writers, and humans with generally multiple things to do, will learn a lot from this. Mihaly is an interesting person to listen to. I caught one of his TED talks a while back. Found the link and shared here for everyone else: https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness?language=en#t-837003
He sets out many points to qualify FLOW and his research, and touches on what I think we all accept as being ‘in the groove’. That in itself is an interesting expression given in the grove is no different from in the rut. Fascinating subject, and being broken down like this makes you see not only how we can be happier but also more proficient and productive. Something that people do not really touched on.
I like the one aspect where we know the activity is doable and we have the skills to do the task. Great inner clarity is another — knowing what needs to be done and how we are doing. He also says that it has become a kind of truism that you can’t be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field. Very common sense stuff, but often ignored –practice, after all, does make perfect.
The whole out of body experience (the writers hand taking over) is ably explained too, by way of the human being only able to process 110bits of info a second. Listening and understanding one person takes 60, which is why we cant process more than that. So focus on a single task puts other things well to one side, including thinking of how the body feels.
I think the actual takeaway for all is that we can do things to affect how we get in the ‘FLOW’ and how we write as a result. It applies to home life, and to work. Being happy plays its part too of course.
We should aspire for higher, or in deed lower, Harry, as false gods always disappoint in the end.
Anyway, after all the technical stuff we have had these past weeks, I think you deserve some flow of your own; be it immersion in the Devonshire sea, or from the local inn’s tap.
Enjoy the break look forward to the obligatory snaps of seagulls sand and fish and chips, not always, but often found together!!
I had that experience recently where the flow was gone and nothing I did could bring it back, days became weeks etc etc – I realised that the problem was that the story had died and I had been in the denial stage of grief. Once I got myself to acceptance, I went back to my outline, and found a flicker of life – re-wrote the outline, expanded it to make sure I still felt it, and now I’m writing again. So far, so good, and a reasonably flow-ful experience has emerged and hopefully a much stronger narrative to boot. Fingers crossed!
So true! Writing and editing are magic where time is an unknown word. Oops have I eaten yet?!
Enjoy your well-earned holiday by the beach, Harry. And keep climbing those rocks.
Your insights and encouragement keep on coming.
Appreciate you!