"Flow stretches a person beyond his usual limits."
Reading notes: Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography (1997) by Katherine Ramsland
Reading Ramsland’s 1995 biography of Dean Koontz this week, I was struck by this description of his experience when writing Watchers (1987).
As he had fully immersed, he had experienced a heightened feeling of productivity. As always, the book had been difficult to write, but toward the last third, when he had gained a clear sense of As he had fully immersed, he had experienced a heightened feeling of productivity. As always, the book had been difficult to write, but toward the last third, when he had gained a clear sense of direction and simultaneous feelings of control and spontaneity, he had an incredible experience. Most of this book had taken eight months, but the last part moved quickly. “It just flew,” Dean says.
It began in Part Two, Section Nine, where Einstein grew ill. Dean began to write and did not stop, save for one break, for two days. “I got up one morning and went to work. I ate a sandwich at my desk, kept going, worked around the clock, and finally fell into bed the next evening, totally exhausted. I slept that night, and the next morning got up and worked twenty-four hours straight. In the first session, which was about thirty-six hours, I wrote something like forty pages. In the second session, I wrote around forty pages in even less time. That’s about thirty thousand words in two sessions, and it needed almost no revision.”
What Dean had experienced is what University of Chicago professor and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “Flow.” He had first studied the phenomenon of intrinsically motivated experiences with surgeons and mountaineers who reported a feeling of great joy from complete immersion in what they were doing. He then expanded it to creativity studies. “Action follows upon action,” Csikszentmihalyi stated, “according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor. He experiences it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which he is in control of his actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present, and future.”
Closely associated with Japanese Zen practices, it is what athletes called being “in the groove,” “playing out of one’s head,” or being “pumped up” or “wired.” Others have called it “peak performance,” the “optimum performance state,” “the zone,” or the “white moment.” It is the context for excellence, involving a sense of effortlessness which results in one’s best work. A tennis player might reach an “impossible” ball or an artist turn out a painting in hours that might usually have taken days or weeks. There is a difference between this experience and simply writing hack work quickly. It has to do with state of mind, combined with skill, confidence, and experience.
Creativity and energy feed each other at such times, minimizing external distractions to the point of perceptual nonexistence. The person in Flow can perform for hours without noticing hunger, external noises, or room temperature. Time seems simultaneously to be faster and slower. The individual feels utterly unified with the task at hand. He is totally present. “The dancer becomes the dance,” said author Louis L’Amour. “I am the writing.”
Flow stretches a person beyond his usual limits. It bonds him with his work, and yields both euphoria and stamina. “Flow,” wrote Csikszentmihalyi, “is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.”5 Although it appears to be effortless, it evolves from discipline. The best conditions come from a good balance of focus, motivation, organization, vision, energy, and the ability to allow inner resources to be freely expressed.
Centering attention on the merging of action and awareness distorts one’s perception of time and blocks self-consciousness. An easy, yet intense, rhythm develops. Thought and motion become single-minded intention. The individual just lets go and operates as if on automatic pilot. He is an instrument of the work. People in Flow report feeling “most alive” or “at full throttle” — a sense of having been transported into a new, sharper reality.
“If I could do that all the time,” says Dean, “I could write a book in ten days and it would be of higher quality than what comes with endless struggle. You look at something like what happened with Watchers and say it’s uncanny. How is it possible for me to write at the same level on those pages when I struggled with all these other pages at the rate of two or three a day? When I look at the results, it’s actually better than stuff that I worked on for a longer period of time.
“Those are the moments that seem like a form of meditation, or a connection with something else. It’s phenomenal. Time ceases to have meaning. I worked all day and right through the night and into the following afternoon — yet it was only in the last hour or two that I began to feel tired. Then I crashed totally. There was no sense of weariness, no sense of time passing. You look at your watch and think it’s been two hours and it’s been ten or twelve. That is definitely an altered state of consciousness. You have this ebullient, joyful feeling.
“It always looks self-destructive, working like that, and I could never make people — even most other writers — understand that it was not something you totally controlled. Everything is coming to you in an avalanche and you’re not able to get up and walk away. You’re so into it that you don’t even realize how long you’ve been there. It doesn’t happen as often as I’d like. When it does happen, you have to take advantage of it. Stay on the sleigh ride as long as it lasts! Pretty soon, the longer you do it, the greater the momentum, and you remain in that state.” and simultaneous feelings of control and spontaneity, he had an incredible experience. Most of this book had taken eight months, but the last part moved quickly. “It just flew,” Dean says.
