We all want it, of course: that sense of being guided in our work by a golden thread of inspiration. It’s one of the most purely exhilarating experiences on the human experiential spectrum. You feel like what you’re writing (drawing, composing, conceiving, constructing, cultivating) is emerging effortlessly, perfectly, and you’re just the conduit. The right words and turns of phrase spring spontaneously from your fingers. Your powers and energies seem mysteriously and exquisitely aligned to bring forth exactly what you mean, and even — holy of holies, the mother lode of creative gifts — to release things you didn’t consciously know you wanted to say, but that greet you with a staggering sense of rightness when they land there on the page.

“Everybody enjoys it now and then,” says Lawrence Block in his oh-so-wonderful Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers, “when the words flow effortlessly and you feel plugged into the universal mind and the stuff on the page is worlds better than what you had in mind when you sat down. This doesn’t happen very often, but I’ll tell you it’s a kick when it does.”

Yes, it’s a kick when it happens — but it’s a sharper one when it doesn’t, and especially when you’re not just lacking that flow but are positively possessed by its opposite state. Many times in my moments of creative block, I have thought of Block’s words — and have hated them. I have thought of Kierkegaard’s description of an authorial state in which his ideas seemed to emerge fully formed, with exquisite perfection — and I have cringed. What sounds inspiring when you’re in a positive state sounds revolting and crushing when you’re in a negative one, and I have known all too well those extended states when the opposite energy from Kierkegaard’s comes over me, and everything I write emerges deformed, stillborn, or both. Maybe you’ve known this state, too.

So the question, naturally, is how to experience the divine flow state and not its opposite, how to generate or receive it, if indeed it’s a state that is accessible to effort instead of a purely supernatural-seeming endowment that categorically eludes our attempts at controlling it.

Here are several suggestions, ranging from the practical to the theoretical, that stem from my own experience and that of several other writers and artists. As you’ll see, some of these suggestions are distinctly more mundane and concrete than the psychologically and philosophically oriented advice I’ve previously offered at this blog. Remember, we’re examining creativity as a relationship between you and an independent, or independent-feeling, force or presence in your psyche. That means we’re looking at creative work as growing out of a relationship between you and the whatever-it-is in your soulspace: your muse, daimon, genius. Sometimes, as in our relationships with other people, we have to work on ourselves; sometimes, in the most humble of ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: 10000 hours, active imagination, active waiting, carl jung, Dealing with Creative Block, flow, jonathan fields, julie heffernan, kay redfield jamison, kierkegaard, lawrence block, malcolm gladwell, matthew mcconaughey, meditation, mindfulness, Steven Pressfield, writer's block