How Writers Get in The Zone (or, What We Can Learn About Transcendant Creativity From Basketball, the Tao Te Ching, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
BlogTV Discussion Member: How do you get in “the zone”?
John Green: I don’t know. But when I do, it feels really good.
We all have moments of it.
People dub the experience with different names – Flow, The Zone, The Groove. Whatever you call it, when that fate smiles on your clumsy little noggin, you feel transported and greater for it.
One particular ZOMG Hallelujahz! encounter I had with this godly force came on the basketball court at my alma mater. I was a 4th Year then (and yes, we were designated by years, like sad imitations of the Hogwarts crew). First of all, understand: I stink at b-ball – I’m a mediocre driveway hoopster at best. But on this particular day – for which, regrettably, there were no witnesses! – I, Mike “Clumsy Noggin” Martin, began to toss swish after swish following swish.
A photorealistic portrayal of me from my spring 2007 ZONE experience...'Kay, not really.
The satisfying snap of net echoed on the hardwood. I put up threes, two-pointers, foul shouts, layups, Granny-style, skyhook: Nearly everything arced, twirled, sank – hold your breath – snapped.
It was one of the most rewarding and enjoyable experiences of my life.
The pertinent question: Just how the crud was I doing that?
The only way I know how to describe it: I suddenly understood basketball.
Without thought, I knew exactly how hard to put it up, the precise arc each shot required.
When I left, I was shocked to find three hours had passed in the gymnasium. Time had seemed to move both much slower and in an eye’s blink. And as I headed out to the parking lot, I specifically remember thoughts were like this:
ZOMG, I are prodigy wif skills! I can be pro now, preeze?
I was back at the gym before seven o’clock the next morning.
And I couldn’t sink a freakin’ thing.
I was haunted and depressed (completely unjustifiably, by the way, as I was, in fact, at film school, and not a tryout with the Knicks). What had happened? What had I experienced before, and how had I experienced it before, and how could I get it back?
Come this point, you might be wondering, Okay Mikey, nifty tale, and I’m real sorry nobody saw you, but I trust you, and I bet you’re handsome and you’ll be in the NBA pretty soon. If Mugsy can do it, you can, too. But one thing - what does this have to do with writing tips?
To Which I Reply: Firstly, you humble.
And secondly – everything.
Getting in The Zone is something that can make your creativity soar. It is something Stephen King talks about as an almost mystical experience, something Thoreau ponders time and again in Walden.
And most miraculously, it is something, I have been blessed enough to find, that we can do a lot to control and induce at will.
I offered an anecdotal description of a Zone or Flow experience above, but what is it, really?
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the world’s leading expert on what he calls “the psychology of optimal experience.” In his classic book Flow, he describes being in Flow (his preferred term) as “the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity…being 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.” He discovered the idea of Flow and dubbed it thus because (to quote the Oracle Wikipedia), “[D]uring Csíkszentmihályi’s 1975 interviews several people described their ‘Flow’ experiences using the metaphor of a water current carrying them along.”
So that’s a very neat and academic way of saying, d00d, I was so money ballin’ the other day, it felt awsum, whoa!
It would be a mistake, however, to believe that Csíkszentmihályi was the first person to document this phenomenon. The sixth-century BCE Tao Te Ching has a wonderful example of it.
Prince Wen Hui’s cook
Was cutting up an ox.
Out went a hand,
Down went a shoulder,
He planted a foot,
He pressed with a knee,
The ox fell apart
With a whisper,
The bright cleaver murmured
Like a gentle wind.
Rhythm! Timing!
Like a sacred dance…
Like ancient harmonies!
“Good work!” the Prince exclaimted,
“Your method is faultless!”
“Method?” said the cook
Laying aside his cleaver,
“What I follow is Tao
Beyond all methods!
“When I first began
To cut up oxen
I would see before me
The whole ox
All in one mass.
After three years
I no longer saw this mass.
I saw the distinctions.
“But now I see nothing
With the eye. My whole being
Apprehends.
My senses are idle. The spirit
Free to work without plan
Follows its own instinct
Guided by natural line,
By the secret opening, the hidden space,
My cleaver finds its own way.
I cut through no joint, chop no bone…
“There are spaces in the joints;
The blade is thin and keen:
When the thinness
Finds that space
There is all the room you need!
It goes like a breeze!
Hence I have this cleaver nineteen years
As if newly sharpened!
“True, there are sometimes
Tough joints. I feel them coming,
I slow down, I watch slowly,
Hold back, barely move the blade,
And whump! the part falls away
Landing like a clod of earth.
“Then I withdraw the blade,
I stand still
And let the joy of the work
Sink in.
I clean the blade
And put it away.”
“Prince Wen Hui said,
“This is it! My book has shown me
How I ought to live
My own life!”
I’m sure you can see how that is describing a Zone experience – the instrinsic joy of the task at hand, the sense of effortless mastery. Makes me want to carve me an ox, how ’bout you?
But – and I’m guessing this is what you’re waiting for – the poem also hints at one of the the methods by which we can learn…
How To Get In The Zone
(Before we go on, a caveat: We all know, there’s no magic bullet, right? Reading this post will not make you a Zen master, or Stephen King, or be more “awsum” Granny-style fieldgoals, for that matter. Getting in The Zone, like anything else, requires an effort of education and adjustment.)
Csikszentmihalyi found that, in order to have the chance of experiencing Flow, the activity in which you are participating must meet most, if not all, of these criteria:
- You must have clear goals, and have a way of knowing whether you are on or off track. (How this applies to my basketball story: I had a goal – play basketball – and knew whether or not I was on-track because sometimes the ball went in and sometimes it did not.) This doesn’t mean, necessarily, that in order to experience Flow, you must say, “I’m going to write 5,437 words today!” Rather, it means that you cannot expect to experience Flow accidentally. You must pick a task (sitting at your computer), and have a goal for that task (“I’m going to write my novel”). Even now, though, I can hear my fellow writers bellow, But when I’m writing, sometimes I don’t know if I’m on track or not! Csikszentmihalyi speaks to this directly, when he writes, in Flow, “In some creative activities, where goals are not clearly set in advance, a person must develop a strong personal sense of what she intends to do. The artist might not have a visual image of what the finished painting should look like, but when the picture has progressed to a certain point, she should know whether it is what she wanted to achieve or not. And a painter who enjoys painting must have internalized citeria for ‘good’ or ‘bad’ so that after each brush stroke she can say, ‘Yes, this works; no, this doesn’t.’ WIthout such internal guidelines, it is impossible to experience Flow.‘ Or, put another way…
- The goals must align with – and stretch – one’s skill set and abilities. (I wasn’t playing one-on-one with Michael Jordan; I wasn’t playing Horse a kindergartener. I was just shooting around,from distances I was strong enough to make, over and over again .) In other words, you cannot expect to experience Flow while writing a novel if you’ve never written a novel before. The more complex a task, the more complex your skills must be. Have you ever been playing tennis (or any sport) with someone who’s juuuuust slightly better than you? There’s a good chance you may have experienced Flow, because skills were capable and being challenged. Like a muscle being worked, there’s a pleasure to the difficulty. Now, have you ever played tennis with someone much better or much worse than you? Odds are, you won’t experience Flow in such a situation. If the task is greater than your skills, you become frustrated; if it’s less than your skills, you become bored.
- Concentrate and focus absolutely on the task at hand. (I was the only person in the gym, and had no homework to do that day, and so was not distracted either by other people/embarrassment for my lack of skill, nor by any other things weighing heavily on my noggin.) In our Twitter’d/Facebook’d/iPhone’d world, this may be the great barrier to getting in The Zone. Why? Because we can always justify multitasking. However, this creates mental chaos, and all our psychic energy becomes too defused. In order to experience Flow, you must must must be absolutely focused on the task at hand, and nothing else. After a while, of course, this goes on autopilot, and thusly you don’t get hungry or pay attention to the time or particularly care or notice what’s going on around you. (For instance, while I was writing this blog post, I shut down all other programs and closed all my browser tabs and even turned off my music, because although I know many writers really love to use music, I sometimes find it distracting and also find that it dictates rather than complements what I write.) The easy lesson here? You can multitask, you can experience Flow…but you can’t do both.
Create those three criteria, and you’re on your way to experiencing The Zone. If you do this and you don’t experience it, just keep trying. One thing Csikszentmihalyi is very clear about is that it requires a very complex, structured, disciplined mind to get the most Flow possible, and we can add to that complexity every day. Activities such as chess, reading analytically, and simply writing without Flow help create a more complex mind, which makes Flow more a consistent possibility for us. Activities such as watching television atrophy the mind, and make you less likely to experience Flow. (He has a very interesting discussion of pleasure [empty] vs. enjoyment [rewarding and personally challenging] that I may discuss later.)
Anyway, as a quick recap, just remember.
1. Have goals, and know whether or not you’re doing well. 2. Goldilocks your challenges – make them Just Right. 3. Distraction = destruction.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play some b-ball.
