Toward a Methodology of Discovery Writing: What Is Flow and How Can I Use It?

Learn how to cultivate both passive and active flow.

(Find my other posts in this series here.)

I’m going to let you in on my biggest struggle as a writer: finishing novels. I can make it to the middle, even a little bit past that, and then I just…stop being able to figure out what to write next. I’ve only completed one novel in my entire life. I have three I haven’t finished. I knew that with my current novel project I needed to try something different.

My major issue with past novels is that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think my way through to the end. I can’t plot. I have what seem like great plot ideas, but then when I try to puzzle out how to integrate them, I get a familiar sinking feeling. They’re not going to work. Usually it’s because they don’t seem to suit the story. They complicate things too much – like I’m trying to really hard to hammer an octagonal peg into a square hole. I hammered on that damn peg for years, and could never get it to fit.

I finally found my answer in an intuitive writing course I took with coach Lauren Sapala. She taught me that intuitive writers put themselves straight into a block if they try to force things by explicitly plotting or planning. They have to let things come to them intuitively, from their subconscious. But how?

The answer is flow.

Flow is a term invented by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (ME-high Cheek-SENT-me-high) to describe a state of happiness where you are so completely absorbed by an activity that time and ego fall away. You are able to intuitively move through the activity without explicit thought or control, each action fluidly following on the previous and creating a harmonious whole that just works. Flow is central to discovery writing.

We have all experienced flow at one time or another, usually inadvertently. The trick is to learn how to facilitate and channel it for specific tasks, like writing. Today I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about that and how I cultivate flow. I want to say up front that I’m no kind of expert at this! In fact, I’m only just learning. But when I started trying to channel flow, I realized I’d already been using flow techniques in my life, I just hadn’t recognized them as such. Chances are, you have too.

Facilitating passive flow in your life.

The hardest part about flow is getting into it. Once you do that, it’s easy – that’s the whole point of flow. It stands to reason that you can enhance your ability to access flow by never being too far from it. Cultivating what I call passive flow in your life can help. This is a baseline flow level that is always there. When you stray too far from it in your day-to-day life, you’ll feel it, and you can pause to tap back into it. We all have access to this baseline flow already, but most of us have strayed so far from it that we no longer realize it’s there. You can get it back by eliminating anti-flow things from your life.

Here’s how to do that. Anything that disrupts your inner calm, focus, or equilibrium is anti-flow. Distracting stressful events, mind-numbing or anxiety-producing tasks, too much busyness, people who drain you, emotionally taxing experiences…you know what I’m talking about. Having some stuff like this in life is inevitable and even necessary for our development as human beings, but when it’s too much and overtakes your capacity to feel good about your life, that’s taking you away from your flow.

You may need to become ruthless about what you allow into your life. You may need to make personally difficult sacrifices and eject some things, activities, or people from your life. You can start small, but eventually hard choices need to be made. I’ve written elsewhere about that process, and about hard choices I had to make. Here I’ll just say that making the choice is often the hardest part. Living with the consequences can be easier than you think, especially when you realize how much better life feels when you are living with a solid baseline of passive flow.

Over time you’ll get better at recognizing things that are anti-flow. Look at passive flow like the current of a river that you are floating down. You’re moving with the current, letting it carry you along. When you start to struggle against that you can tell, because things start to feel suddenly very hard. You’re going against the current. That’s your signal to let go and tap into that passive flow again. I’ve written about one technique I use to help me with that in this post about my intentional practice of wasting time. Give it a try the next time you start feeling anxious from all the anti-flow things you have to do in your life.

Going with the current in life is how you can stay close to your flow. But imagine what happens when you start swimming with that current. Wow, now you’re really getting somewhere! It’s like when you step onto those moving walkways at the airport and suddenly you’re walking at double speed. That’s how you cultivate active flow – and it’s this state that you use for writing.

Facilitating active flow for writing.

An active flow state is characterized by these things:

• It entails a balance between controlling the experience and letting go of control.  

• It is extra-ordinary, i.e. an involvement in an activity that is not part of the ordinary, everyday world.

• It is a state of absorbed, focused attention.

• It requires continual challenge.

• It is enjoyable.

Facilitating flow is a strange and precarious balance between rules and chaos. It’s like a sports game. There is a framework of rules that channel players’ energy and action, but within that framework anything can happen. The second feature of a sports game is that it is extra-ordinary, a special event that is set apart from regular day-to-day activities. When you are looking to engage with flow for a specific purpose, you must start with a set of ritualized rules that help you set that space and time apart from the rest of your life.

For writing this can look like establishing a special place where you write, and creating a mood for your writing time. I write in the same chair I use for my business work, so when I go into my office to write my fiction, I turn off all the lights except for an old-fashioned, orangey bulb over the chair. I also turn on a noise machine. After doing this for a while, my brain started associating this specific lighting + noise with my special writing time, which helps me enter what’s called writingrealm, an extra-ordinary mental landscape where writing takes place. It doesn’t really matter what rules you set, just that you use them consistently.

From writingrealm, you enter fictionworld. This is the world of your story. It’s important to understand that you will not feel in flow every single minute of writing. A lot of writing is just kind of slogging through it. I don’t mean forcing it, but you should write whether you feel close to your flow or not. This is because the only way to enter flow is by doing the activity that will get you there. Players in a sports game don’t start playing in flow – they enter into it through playing, and probably most dip in and out of it as the game progresses rather than staying in it the whole time. Writing is like this. You’ll be writing, and then suddenly you’ll feel that electricity in you and the words will just…flow. So start writing whatever the next thing is you need to write, and allow the act of writing itself to focus and channel your attention so you can reach that state of absorption in the activity that flow requires.

Now this next part is important. Flow requires continual challenge. Boring, rote activities do not create flow. This is why sports are so good at facilitating flow, because you are not simply playing the same game over and over. Each game is different, even when you play the same team. There is always an element of challenge – to better your performance and to win this next match. With writing, though, there is really no way to challenge yourself in any competitive sense. You have to find a different way.

This discovery part of writing is your challenge. It’s the adventure of finding out what happens next in your story and by so doing, to figure out how to communicate what is in your mind and soul. The ultimate purpose of flow is to facilitate your own growth, a personal transformation and becoming. It’s important to see your writing as part of a process of personal growth, because this is what will keep you going back for more. That’s what makes it enjoyable.

Thinking about flow in terms of passive and active types can help you cultivate it both for everyday life and for specific artistic pursuits. Start with the passive, and give yourself space to develop your skills there. Then apply what you’ve learned to an active flow state. And remember: have fun with it! Letting yourself loosen up and enjoy the game is essential to cultivating flow.