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There’s No Better Feeling Than Being in Writing Flow

And like any good thing, too much is dangerous.

My first experience of writing flow was during the November madness of National Novel Writing Month.

That’s when a bunch of people try to write 50,000 words of a novel in the space of 30 days. I not only needed to make my word count for the day, I had to make up for several days of not-writing.

Sitting at the bar of a coffee shop after a meeting with a client, I ordered a cup of dark roast and added sugar. I opened the word doc manuscript and started typing.

Then I blinked, my word count was up by four thousand, and the coffee cup was still full — but now cold.

The barista was looking at me with a kind of amused curiosity, the way you’d look at a deranged tomcat staggering down the sidewalk.

I had no sense of how much time had passed, but my watch claimed a little over two hours.

I’ve never written that voraciously since, but flow and I have become intimate friends.

The godfather of Flow is a Hungarian psychologist named Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi. I was first introduced to his seminal work Flow during an Improv Composition class in college.