How to Get Into FLOW
If you’ve been following me at Resilient Writers for any length of time, then you’ve heard me say how important it is for us as writers to achieve a state of flow.
Flow helps us have the kind of writing sessions that so many writers long for, where we lose all sense of time and anything that isn’t our characters or our narrative.
But the flow state can seem unattainable if we don’t know how to reach it reliably, each and every time we sit down to write.
Luckily, there’s a dedicated field of scientific study called Positive Psychology that can teach us the concrete conditions that need to be met to reach a state of flow.
How to Get Into Flow
Listen to learn:
- How you can achieve a state of flow in your writing life
- The power of psychology in our writing lives
- Why it’s important to choose the right time for you to write
- The benefits of living as a writer that’s always learning and growing
Here’s a sneak peek…
[04:32] But we are writers and so we want to know: how does this science of creativity, how does this science of flow, help us?
[06:16] Basically we're happiest when we're in a state of flow. It's what gives our lives a sense of meaning and purpose.
[07:46] It's pretty normal for us as writers to have that experience of, “I have this glimmering idea for a novel or a story or a poem in my head, but I don't know if my skills are up to the challenge.”
[11:15] Everything that I've just described, all of these conditions, isn't that how you want to spend your writing life?
[13:22] And for some of us, that's hard. We think, “oh, I've got a really busy life. No one is paying me to write this novel. I'm doing it on top of my job. I'm doing it on top of care, responsibilities, everything else going on in my life, getting groceries in the fridge. I'm doing it on top of everything. And so, I'm often too tired to write.”
[20:34] I love this idea of learning goals that are tied to our passion, but also investing in a love of the process.
[23:08] So, if I'm working on a story and I think, “the ending isn't working,” and I just have this gut feeling about that, I trust that feeling as an artistic impulse.
[35:09] But many writers have completed revised, edited, manuscripts sitting in the drawer, and they went on to publish their second, their third, their fourth manuscript.
Links mentioned in this episode:
Flow Research Collective Radio
Book on Creativity
Book on Flow
Wired to Create book
Ottawa International Writers Festival
How to Get Into Flow: The Resilient Writers Radio Show -- Full Episode Transcript
Well, hey there, writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas, and this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love.
Because—let's face it—the writing life has its ups and downs, and we wanna not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page.
This podcast is for writers who love books, and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who wanna learn and grow in their craft, and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books, and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them, writers who wanna spend more time in that flow state, writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community in this crazy roller coaster ride we call “the writing life.”
We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives, and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, writer, I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.
Rhonda Douglas:
Well, hey there, writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I am your host, and this is a solo episode with me. I want to talk about something that I'm really obsessed with, and I'd like to say low-key obsessed, but no, I'm not so sure. I'm actually super obsessed with it.
Ever since I got into this, which is years ago now, as a result of a master's program I was doing, I really got into the science of flow, the state of creative flow, and all of the new social science around it and what we can do to create more of that state of flow in our writing lives.
That's what I'm going to get into today. I've got a few things I'm going to recommend for further reading, if you want to get obsessed about this the way I am, and also some suggestions. There's another podcast that I just love on this.
So, we're going to talk about what flow is, and what are the kinds of things we can do in order to cultivate more of it in our lives, particularly in our writing lives. We're going to talk about some of the things that highly creative people do in order to foster more flow in their lives, and ultimately, we're looking for all of the ways we can get more flow in our lives for our writing.
Just a little caveat here, this is an increasingly large scientific field going back to the early psychological studies on it to very contemporary work in the field of positive psychology. I'm not a scientist, I'm just obsessed, and I'm sure there's more you can get into if you'd love to.
A couple of things I'll recommend, there's a preeminent scientist, he's passed away now—I'll probably butcher his name, but let me try it—it’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He has two books. One is called Creativity, and the other one is just called Flow, and I highly recommend them. He is sort of the father of the research on flow, if you like, and so a lot of his work just speaks directly to the artist and to the writer.
Another great book in this field is Creating Minds by Howard Gardner. He interviewed a whole bunch of musicians and artists and writers and got into what is the state that they foster when they're at their most creative. That's Creating Minds by Howard Gardner.
And then there's a book called Wired to Create by Kaufman and Gregoire, and that's a really good one as well. I'm going to draw on that one as I talk to you today. And there's a great TED Talk by Csikszentmihalyi called Flow, the Secret to Happiness.
So, it turns out flow is important for more things than just getting your writing done. But we are writers, and so we want to know: how does this science of creativity, how does this science of flow, help us?
The definition of flow is, “an optimal experience when what we are engaged in is almost automatic.” It's an effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness. It's that sense of complete absorption in something. And Csikszentmihalyi says it's “when you're being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away, time flies, every action, movement and thought flows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved and you're using your skills to the utmost.”
Now, I love that. That's an ideal definition. I think as writers, we'd say, “look, we've all had experiences like that. We've all had writing sessions that feel like that.” They don't all feel like that, of course, but when we can get them, don't they feel amazing? This is why we want more of them.
Why does creative flow matter? When we're experiencing flow, we just feel like we're living more fully than during the rest of life. And often the product of flow, creativity, leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future and of other lives beyond our own.
For writers, that's our stories and poems and essays, our novels, our memoirs. For visual artists, it's their art. For musicians, it's their music. So for Csikszentmihalyi, he says that basically we're happiest when we're in a state of flow. It's what gives our lives a sense of meaning and purpose.
But there are certain conditions that need to be in place in order for you to experience that sometimes elusive state of flow.
Okay, so here are some of the conditions. The first condition is that in order to experience flow, we need a clear goal. We need to know, what is it we're doing here? Are we writing a short story? Are we writing a poem? Are we trying to figure out our character arc? Are we trying to decide what scenes we're going to include or not include in our memoir? What's our goal, and what's our short-term goal and what's our long-term goal? Are we hoping to get a book out into the world?
And then the other thing that is a condition of flow is this sense that you're getting feedback on your actions, and that can come from literal feedback. It can come from someone saying, “oh, I really like that line in your poem,” but can also be the sense of feedback that comes when you're in that state and you're completely absorbed and you feel like one thing is flowing after the other, where you've got a character in a scene and it's just really clear to you what the next step is, what's going to happen next, what choices that character's going to make.
Another condition of flow is a balance between the challenge that's in front of us, the artistic, the aesthetic challenge in front of us in our writing life, and our skills. It's pretty normal for us as writers to have that experience of, “I have this glimmering idea for a novel or a story or a poem in my head, but I don't know if my skills are up to the challenge.”
Where usually it's easier to access a state of flow when our sense of challenge and our understanding of our skills are in some kind of balance. So we're like, “yeah, I think I can give that a try. I think that I can learn enough and I can improve my skills in the process, and so I'm willing to dive all in.”
Another condition of flow is that action and awareness are merged. So you're not sitting there thinking, “I'm wondering what I'm going to write about,” you're actually in the writing and as you're writing, it's clear to you what you have to write next. It's that action and awareness being merged.
A lovely condition of flow is that distractions are excluded from consciousness. If you've ever written in a cafe or a library, you will have that sensation where there's other people around, but they don't matter because you are so in your work.
You may as well be on another planet or in a parallel universe, wherever your characters are, right? It's that sense of just being so into it that there are no distractions that could possibly matter.
Also, a condition of flow is that you're not worried about failure. You're just so in it that you kind of don't care about the outcome because you're so involved in the process. You are so into what you're doing that the idea of failure doesn't cross your mind. I think we most often tend to get wrapped up in failure, and thoughts of failure, when we're not writing, not when we are writing, and certainly not when we're in a state of flow.
And self-consciousness disappears. This is kind of related. You're not thinking, “I wonder what other people think of me as a writer,” right? You're just making that character go from point A to point B, or you're just working on clarifying the perfect image in that poem or figuring out your line breaks.
You are not thinking about yourself and what others think of you. Your sense of time also becomes distorted. You've definitely had this experience, if you've ever been in any kind of flow state where, “oh, I think I've been writing for 20 minutes, but nope, I've been writing for 45 minutes.” Or I just sat down and I said, “oh, you know what? I'll just write for 10 minutes.” And when I looked up, it was 60 minutes later. Your sense of time just collapses because you're so involved in it.
And then the other condition of flow, and I love this, this is the pure delight of the state of flow. The other condition is that the activity becomes an end in itself so that we are in the process, that the process is everything. The act of writing is a delight. Don’t you love that? Everything that I've just described, all of these conditions, isn't that how you want to spend your writing life? Doesn't that feel amazing when that happens?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, “flow may not happen often, but when it does, the beauty of it justifies all the hard work.” And he has more to say—he has a lot to say. He’s got a whole body of work on this. But I love what he has to say about cultivating a creative life. Some of this is from his book, Creativity. He says that, “with a creative life, you want to foster curiosity and surprise. You follow the sparks of interest.” You find yourself thinking, “huh, that's kind of interesting, the way I watched that man in the coffee shop. Have a thought just flash across his face, and yet he said something completely different.” Isn't that interesting? And you just follow that. You follow those sparks of interest. That's where your art is in those sparks of interest, and we can cultivate flow in everyday life when we set goals and work to improve our skills.
In First Book Finish, I talk a lot about shifting our identity as writers to become a writer who's learning and growing. We're just always learning and growing as writers. It's kind of a hopeful way to think of ourselves instead of a more fixed kind of thinking. And we can continually challenge ourselves, continually increase the complexity of our work. Once we learn how to write a scene a certain way, or we learn how to work with dialogue a certain way, we can mix it up and try something new. And this is important as well.
So, Csikszentmihalyi says, “we have to create habits and routines to give more time, energy, and focus to our creative work, and we use our best energy for our creative work.” And for some of us, that's hard. We think, “oh, I've got a really busy life. No one is paying me to write this novel. I'm doing it on top of my job. I'm doing it on top of care, responsibilities, everything else going on in my life, getting groceries in the fridge. I'm doing it on top of everything. And so, I'm often too tired to write.”
But what Csikszentmihalyi is suggesting is that for optimal conditions of flow, we set ourselves up to use our best energy.
If you're a night owl, maybe that looks like sitting down to write at 10:00 PM. For me, I'm a morning person, so it looks like writing in the morning. We have sessions, community writing sessions in the Writer's Flow Studio, and a couple of those are at 7:00 AM. I host the Monday morning, 7:00 AM ones, and I love that. My brain's not yet awake. It hasn't yet started yammering at me about all the ways in which I'm inadequate, and so I can just more easily slip into that state of flow. I love it.
He also talks about shaping your space and surroundings to enhance your sense of flow, and practice moving from a sense of openness to a sense of closure. For me, this may seem a little strange, but for me, this comes down to, for a long time I was a writer who was happy journaling morning pages, character sketches, notes for poems. And we have to learn how to move from the initial openness to inspiration, to the kind of closure that comes from taking that and shaping it and looking at it and saying, “it's not perfect, but it's finished for now.” And that's hard. It's a bit of a lifetime of practice in that.
He also talks about problem solving and divergent thinking. I think that's something we're automatically doing as writers, and he focuses a lot of his attention on folks who specialize in a domain.
So for some of us, when we work in multiple genres—so, I work in multiple genres. I do creative nonfiction, I do poetry, I do narrative work, I do the novel, the short story, and I love them all. And so for me, my domain is writing. And maybe that's true for you, but maybe your domain is, actually you'd really like to specialize in just improving your skills in creative nonfiction, or becoming the best poet you can possibly be. And this goes back to challenging ourselves and continuing to invest in the development of our skills.
These are things that foster flow. And so I think the more that we can think about, what is our domain? And how do we increase our skills over time as we learn and grow as writers, the more we'll engage in that state of flow when we sit down to write, I have just shared this quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Creativity.
He says, “it is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively.” I think for those of us who have to fit our writing in and among everything else that we do in our lives, it is challenging for us to think about our environment.
So, I do a whole thing. I have a whole workshop I do on this about your writing routine and your writing ritual, and how important it is to have some control of your space, even if you work in spaces where you live with other people, and they're often in that space.
Do give some thought to that. Maybe you're lucky enough to have a door that closes in a room that you can call your own to write, but if you don't, how can you take control over your space? Can you wear headphones? Can you get a little portable writing—I call it my portable writing office, it's a tote bag that has all the things I need to go right in a coffee shop. How can you take more control over your environment to foster creativity?
I have quotes that I framed and put up in my office. I have candles and things that keep me comfortable, and I want the same for you. I want you to have a little more control over your space and your surroundings in ways that enhance your sense of flow, make it easier for you to slip into that state of flow.
I want to move on now to some of the work by Kaufman and Gregoire. I really do love this book, Wired to Create, highly recommend. And so I'm just going to walk through some of the things that they say highly creative people do.
And the first thing is, no surprise, imaginative play. They say that, “play and intrinsic joy are intimately connected, creating a synergy that naturally leads to greater inspiration, effort, and creative growth.” I think I foster that in my life in a few ways. One is as a way to center myself before I write.
And if you're in The Writer's Flow Studio with me, where I come from on this. I'm trying to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system to take away the creative anxiety that I might otherwise feel. And so I add a little element of play, and sometimes it's a zen doodle. Sometimes I've got my Jane Austen coloring book and my coloring pencils, and I'll do like three to five minutes of adult coloring before I start. But also, I'm playing all the time when I'm writing. I'm asking myself questions like, “how can I put this character in a situation that makes everything just that much worse and watch how she gets out of it?” That too is a form of creative play.
So the second thing that creative people do from Kaufman and Gregoire, they talk about passion, falling in love, both with your dream and the creative process. They say, “we must also develop strategies for keeping sight of those dreams while we work through the inevitable challenges that the creative journey presents. Grit, optimism, passion, and hope are all strategies that we use to help us achieve our goals.” And they talk about the importance of learning goals.
So for most of us, we have goals. We finish 10 poems, pull together a book of poems, get your book of poems published. But do we have learning goals? Learn how to write a villanelle, learn how to write a sonnet, learn how to structure a book in fragments, right? There's all kinds of things that we can learn as writers, and I love this idea of learning goals that are tied to our passion, but also investing in a love of the process.
The third thing that Kaufman and Gregoire say creative people do is daydream. Don't you love this? Alice Monro said that she did some of her best work just staring out her kitchen window. This is where we have the time and the space just to let our minds roam free. So it's that time in the shower, the car, the kitchen, you're walking, you're hiking, you're napping, you're looking at a window, whenever you are letting your mind wander.
This is where I think so much of the culture of productivity, you've always got to be doing, doing. Sometimes we just have to stop, and be, and let our minds wander, and it is not being lazy. It is fostering our creativity. We don't know where the next great idea is going to come from, where that breakthrough is going to come from. So, daydreaming is critical for us as artists and for us as writers.
The fourth thing they talk about, and for all of us introverts, this is joy, solitude. They say that solitary, inwardly focused reflection employs a different brain network than outwardly focused attention. When one is activated, the other is suppressed. This is why our best ideas don't tend to arise when our attention is fully engaged elsewhere.
Oh my God, I love this. So when one part of our brain is activated, the other is suppressed. The time for solitude, that includes purposeful inner reflection, is essential for creative people, for writers.
The fifth thing they talk about creative people doing is intuition. This is where we foster a profound kind of attention to our intuition. We pay attention to our gut feeling, our inner knowing and flashes of insight. We notice these, we get in the habit of noticing them, and we kind grab them and build upon them.
I think that I've come to understand my intuition as an artistic impulse.
Some people refer to the muse and cultivating the muse and embracing the muse, nurturing the muse. I think of my intuition, and that this is where my artistic impulse comes from. So, if I'm working on a story and I think, “the ending isn't working,” and I just have this gut feeling about that, I trust that. And I think that part of becoming mature as an artist and a writer is learning to trust that artistic impulse, that intuition.
Okay, item number six. Moving along here, we've still got a few to go. Item number six, from Kaufman and Gregoire on how to, basically, foster creativity in your life is openness to experience. We need new and unusual experiences to think differently. Creativity benefits from an outsider's mindset. So I want you to ask yourself, “how am I seeking new perspectives?”
One way to do this is to explore other art, other disciplines, explore new ways of thinking, explore history you don't yet know, and just dive into something new. Are you doing something new each day? That can be something new in your writing, but can also be something new in your life? When was the last time you went to an art gallery? I literally have one within a 15 minute walk that is the national gallery of our country, and I'm always going to go, and I don't, right? So yeah, when was the last time you fostered openness to new experiences and new perspectives in your life?
I love this next one. Okay, I love it. And if you've been listening for a while or you're with me in The Writer's Flow Studio, you know how this goes. Number seven is mindfulness. And they relate this to observation. And when you think of the role that we play as a writer, what do we do? We observe the world and we tell the truth about it. That's our job. It's all we've got to do.
Kaufman and Gregoire say, “observation is an important driver of creativity. The capacity to deeply observe is not only a key attentional skill, it's also a distinct creative advantage.” One way to do this is to keep a writer's notebook. With that writer's notebook sitting out in the world, you're at a cafe and you're just writing down the sights, the smells, eavesdropping on dialogue, making up stories based on a character that you see and how someone clears their throat in the middle of a conversation or turns their body away from someone. All of that is the practice of paying exquisite attention to the world. And it's a form of mindfulness, and it's super important to us as writers.
I think that meditation is really helpful for writers. It's really helpful for those of us that deal with any kind of anxiety, creative anxiety, or more generalized anxiety in our lives. That's something that's really helped me. And there's all kinds of guided meditations, loving kindness, meditation, gratitude meditation, all the way to zen meditation, transcendental meditation, whatever excites you in the form of meditation, you've got lots of choices.
And for years, I thought I was no good at it. I thought that my mind was not the kind of mind that could do meditation. Every time I tried to meditate, I kept having thoughts, and I thought the point was not to have thoughts instead of observing your thoughts and letting them just be. And then the other form of mindfulness that's critical to fostering a sense of flow in your life is the managing of distractions.
If you are writing with all of your tabs open and everybody’s able to ping you on messenger, and I used to say Skype, but WhatsApp and whatever else you're using, my friend, you are doing it wrong. You are not going to be able to get into and stay in a state of flow until you manage distractions and get super fierce about that. Like, really effing fierce about managing distractions as you're trying to write. So, that's number seven.
Number eight is an interesting one. They talk about this concept of sensitivity, and they think about sensitivity as harnessing and channelling our deep responsiveness to life. It's a kind of imaginational overexcitability, right? Pursuing conscious personal development to allow us to integrate and manage intense experiences of the world. I think that many of us come to writing because we are sensitive creatures.
I have this all the time. I'm out in the park with the dog in the morning, and I feel profoundly sensitive to the way the light hits the tree, the sound of the wind in the trees, the joy of my dog, the joy of all the other dogs. There's nothing like a dog's joy. And I am fully immersed in that. I am deeply responsive to it.
I'm also deeply responsive to things that generate despair, right? The situation in Palestine right now, and the situation in Ukraine before that, Yemen before that, Syria before that, Sudan right now, Congo right now, right? All the things that don't appear on the front page of the newspaper or on social media. Climate change. I'm sensitive to all of that. And so I have to consciously pursue ways to manage that sensitivity. And my writing is one of the ways I do that, whether it's journaling in order to manage some climate despair or it's turning something into art, writing a poem about something, featuring something in a short story.
I'm trying to figure out what I can do with this sense of deep responsiveness and excitability that I have to life, and it's why I turn to writing. I love that Kaufman and Gregoire highlighted sensitivity as one of the conditions that creative people set up in their lives, or I guess it's more a quality of creative people and a strength, because I used to think that my sensitivity was a problem to be managed as opposed to a strength to be nurtured and guided. Do you know what I mean? Big difference, right?
They also talk about, so this is number nine, they talk about turning adversity into advantage. This goes back to that old idea that the great artists are writing out of trauma. And I don't think that's true, and they say that as well. I'm going to quote them directly here. They say, “it bears repeating that trauma is neither necessary nor sufficient for creativity. But there can be a lot of creative growth in its aftermath.”
In psychology, I think they call this post-traumatic growth. It's where we've gone through a traumatic experience, a difficult experience, a place of despair, and we've come out on the other side with new understanding and new wisdom. And that's part of what we can share as writers, right? And I think when we're writing, we're often writing from the scar as opposed to the wound. And Kaufman and Gregoire say, “adverse events can be so powerful, so transformative in our life, that they force us to think about questions we just wouldn't have thought about otherwise.” And that's kind of amazing. And this speaks to that meaning-making aspects of our creative work that we are meaning-making creatures.
That's true of humans. But I think that as writers, we particularly can't avoid meaning, and part of why we write is to express that meaning and to understand that meaning for ourselves and to share it with other human beings. So that's number nine, turning adversity into advantage.
And then number 10 in the list of things that creative people do that help us to foster this state of flow is thinking differently. So, they talk about creative people as being nonconformist, being unconventional, and rejecting traditional forms and subject matter. Some of my favourite writers, I think of George Saunders and Lincoln in the Bardo, like, oh gosh, so many. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, right?
Some of my favourite pieces of work were from people who looked at a form and said, “nah.” My own short story collection, Welcome to the Circus, was based on the idea of how far can I stretch a short story before it breaks for the reader.
And so often we're rejecting the idea of a traditional form, a traditional approach to writing. And that is often, when we're in that profound state of flow, it's when we're wrestling with a problem like that. “How do I do something differently than others have done it before me?” Kaufman and Gregoire say, “creativity is often the natural result of risk taking. If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.” Oh my God, you guys, I hate being wrong, and I hate the sense of, “I think I'm failing here. I think this might not be any good.” I hate it. It just causes me profound anxiety.
Part of the reason I come to all of this stuff, and I'm so obsessed with it, is because of the creative anxiety that I experience as I'm trying to create. And so the idea that I've got to fail, I've got to fail, I've got to fail over and over again. And that's part of creativity. Kaufman and Gregoire also say that numbers and volume matter. They say creators create again and again and again.
And there's a kind of call to action implicit in that, of leaving a trail of failures in our wake, right? I was at the Ottawa International Writers Festival a little while ago. I do interviews for them during the festival. They bring in different writers, and I am one of the hosts, and I read the books, and then we have a conversation about them kind of on a stage with folks there. So fun. If you've never been to your local writer's festival, definitely get there. I just love it. And one of the things that came up in it wasn't my panel, it was the one before that I was watching with Karma Brown, Ashley Audrain, I think her name is, and Amy Stuart.
And they got into this idea of failure, and they asked each other about the books in the drawer. “How many books in your drawer do you have?” I don't know about you, but I've got a couple. I've got a memoir that I decided not to finish. I have a novel that I started and will one day go back to, but I moved on to something else. So that's at least two, right? But many writers have completed revised, edited manuscripts sitting in the drawer, and they went on to publish their second, their third, their fourth manuscript.
I've got a friend, in fact, she was interviewed early on in season one of this podcast, Kate Hartfield, and I said, “Kate, my God, you are so prolific. How are you coming out with book after book after book?” And she said, “well, we sold this one book. And then I had worked on so many, I had them in the drawer. And so now they're coming out. Now they've been edited and revised, but they're coming out now.” Amazing.
But I think we have this idea that the thing that we're working on now must be perfect, couldn't possibly fail. And so we're very discouraged, rightfully so. When you put time and effort into something, you want it to work. But if we're invested in the idea of failing forward and just leaving a trail of failures in our wake and being invested in the process, and doing everything we can to stay focused on that and generating this all important state of flow in our lives, then I think that those things—it's not that they become unimportant, but they're not as important as protecting our process and enjoying the state of flow. And that's really what I want for you. I want you to be successful in your writing life, whatever that looks like for you.
But ultimately, I want you to be writing for the rest of your life, and I want you to be freaking loving it. I think that's what we're here to do, is write and love it. And if we write consistently and love it, we're going to experience more of that state of flow. We stay focused on the process. We experience more of that state of flow, and wouldn’t you know it, the state of flow is where all of our great work comes from.
So if you want to be a better writer, you've got to get really freaking serious about fostering that sense of creative flow in your life and protecting it, because the world is not going to do that for you. The world is not set up for deep work for flow right now. So, you've got to really run counter-cultural to the world in order to achieve this.
There is a research collective called the Flow Research Collective, and they have a podcast, I think it's called The Flow Research Collective Radio Show, something like that. I will put it in the show notes for you. It's another great podcast. They talk about flow in a more general sense, so as it applies to sports and business and all that stuff. But for me, it's just the science of it is so freaking fascinating. And every time I hear a new thing, I'm like, “ooh, how can I get some of that in my writing life? How can I make that condition more likely to happen for myself so that I am experiencing consistent states of flow in my writing life so that my writing life is enjoyable and I continue to learn and grow as a writer?”
I hope this has been helpful for you. I will see you next week on another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. Take care.
Outro:
Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes.
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