As authors we have known this from day one: writing is not easy. There are many moving pieces when it comes to crafting the best story we can write. But is there a way to up our chances of writing a great story? Enter the flow. Today, we’re going to talk about getting into a flow state with your writing and publishing activities in particular, what is it that takes you out of flow and how can you avoid that? And then on the flip side, what facilitates flow and how can you add some more of that into your writing life?
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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 056: Getting Into the Flow of Writing
Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 55 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.
Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and we are here to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.
If you find this show helpful, you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking to the buy us a coffee button on the website and the show notes.
Crystal Hunt: Today, we’re going to talk about getting into a flow state with your writing and publishing activities in particular, what is it that takes you out of flow and how can you avoid that? And then on the flip side, what facilitates flow and how can you add some more of that into your writing life?
First as always, we’re going to do a quick update. What is new in your world, Michele?
What has happened since the last episode?
Michele Amitrani: Crystal, I am a finalizing the last bit of editing for Scion of Gaia. The last of my mythological fantasy novella. I have contacted my editor and she would be able to give me back the draft in two, maybe three weeks time. So I’m very excited to have that down because once I will have that, I will just need to slightly rewrite the fifth story, then give it back to my editor and then I will basically have three stories in my pocket and I will have to sit on them until September 2021 when I will start release again, the last three. So I’m very excited for that. I am, if possible, not as much excited as scared for another adventure, this time on the Italian front. I’ve mentioned last time that I was working on a nonfiction series in Italian, and I decided to publish it wide? Because that’s where we’re going, and that’s what we are doing. We are trying to expand and we are trying to reach other markets. I have never done something like this, writing a non-fiction series. This is going to be just three books for now, because I want to see how it goes.
But I’ve never done that before. And for sure I didn’t do it wide and I want to see how it goes. So I’m very excited but at the same time, I’m a bit scared because again, I’ve never done it before and it could be a complete failure or disaster. I will let you know how it goes. It’s basically a nonfiction series about self-publishing.
The first book is about my experience self-publishing. The second one is about my experience using Amazon Ads for promoting my books. And the third one is going to be about mailing list building. So all things that I’m not 100% and expert but I’m a student and I’ve been trying a number of things in the last couple of years.
So I believe I can add some value on this side for the Italian authorpreneurs. So I’m just going to dive in. I’ll let you know how it goes. This books, the first one, if everything goes well it should be released on August, 2021. And finally, I am reading a huge book, an epic fantasy by Brandon Sanderson called Words of Radiance.
And it’s the second one in is the famous, a fantasy series The Stormlight Archive and is huge, it’s more than a thousand pages, I believe. It’s a door stopper. And I’ve been delaying reading this book for a time because I know that it’s going to take months, but I am so hooked into the series that I cannot wait to really dive in.
So this is my next read, but hopefully it’s going to give me some idea for some things that I want to try in the future. And I’m just going to leave you with this open loop. And now Crystal let us know if there is something new from your lovely writerly world.
Crystal Hunt: Well, There is indeed. So I have been working on kind of the backend business stuff a bit as I transitioned away from some of the other consulting and stuff that I was doing, and I’ve gone a hundred percent writing. So that has meant this past week I’ve been meeting with lawyers, accountants, financial advisors, and really trying to nail down all of the templates for like intellectual property management, basically.
New wills, new paperwork, all of that kind of stuff means just really getting my ducks in a row as far as the kind of legal side of things and making sure that everything is properly documented and all optimized from a tax and business perspective, as well as from an intellectual property and copyright perspective.
So that has been really interesting to just step back after 10 years or so in this phase of things and do a bit of a re-evaluation and I think it actually means a shift in the corporate structure that it doesn’t make sense to have the same kind of structures. So that is, is really interesting and I’m going to pick the brains of all the professionals and we can do a episode on copyright at some point with one of our expert guests.
And so that feels really good to have made some decisions though, and to have kind of consultant those professionals and just feel like I really am solidly confident about the way we’re going forward for this next phase of things.
And also been working on the co-author book as we’re getting ready for that. It’s going to come out in the fall. And I’m on the fiction side, working on a cozy mystery actually and I’m also writing a touch of magic book. So I’ve been bouncing back and forth depending on which one is flowing.
And I know that’s an interesting thing we’re going to talk about that after bouncing between things or sticking to just one. And there’s lots of different ways to approach that, but to help me with the cozy mystery I’ve been reading a book called Rock your Plot by Cathy Yardley. And it’s a short little Kindle book, but it packs a punch in terms of content.
So if you are looking for some great prompts and exercises to help you walk through plotting a book it is a fantastic one to read while you’re plotting something new, because a huge part of it is exercises that you do as you’re doing that. And so I would highly recommend checking that out. It’s great.
I’d heard it recommended by lots of people, but had never read it before. Definitely worth a look. And then I’ve also been reading on the fiction side, some JD Robb detective fiction. So that is Nora Roberts pen name for her slightly grittier there. Detective there’s. There’s still love stories, but it’s interesting…
It’s a couple who goes all through the series, they are consistent. So there’s still interesting relationship arcs and stuff, but it does a couple who’s together who are the primary characters in the entire series. And there are, I don’t know, I think she’d been publishing two a year since the nineties.
So there’s a lot of them. I’m only on number 10, I think, but there’s plenty to go there in terms of reading, but I do really enjoy them. So that’s a fun way to map out the beats for a more mystery based detective fiction as well. And then the last thing that I’ve been reading is, as you can tell, I’ve been spending a lot of time on my patio in the sunshine reading books.
The last thing I was reading is a book called Flow, which is actually 30 years old, which completely surprised me. I had no idea how long ago it was written. Then really 1990 to me feels like not that long ago, but it is by a gentleman called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who was a Hungarian American psychologist.
And he does a lot of work in the area of happiness and creativity, but he is known for coining the term ‘flow’ as it relates to really getting caught up in an activity that you’re doing and enjoying that. And so today’s episode is entirely focused on flow and how we can hit that flow state.
But first Michele, I’m curious, what does getting into a flow state mean to you? What does it feel like when you are writing in your inflow or when you’re doing other publishing activities in your in flow, can you talk a little bit about what feels or what you think it means in your brain?
What does flow feel like?
Michele Amitrani: Yeah. A couple of weeks ago we spoke about voice. And I think there are some things that relate to this concept. One of the things that is very similar to the voice is, in my opinion, they are both difficult to define. The flow (and the voice). And I’m a bit envy that you read this book Flow, because I believe that you might have a bit more of a knowledge on this particular subject.
I will have to put it on my to read list for sure. What I think of it is mainly when I’m writing and is the experience of me writing what I need to be writing without being really conscious that I’m doing it and without the activity taking a lot of energy from me. This is what I think of when I think of flow in writing. In my writing, at least.
So it’s everything comes more naturally. We will talk about why this happens, at least how and why this happens to us because everybody’s going to be a bit different. But in my case it happens, I would say, a number of times because I have a routine. And I’m convinced this works for me because I have this kind of routine.
And the moment I stop doing what I’m supposed to do, which is writing consistently every day, the flow stops. It’s like a river that dries out and we already spoke in the show many times about the difference of being a writer who writes consistently and a binge writer. And we already said that there is not a bad way of doing this and a good way of doing the writing.
But I am definitely on the side of the writer who writes consistently every single day. Crystal is very different. She is a binge writer. So she can write 7, 9, 8 hours or more per day. I cannot do something like that. It’s like completely out of my comfort zone. I did that once, I wrote eight hours, in a day and then I think I had to rest for a couple of weeks. This goes back to the concept of flow. That is not how I enter in the flow. The way Michele Amitrani enters in a flow is by writing consistently something more human, like two, three, maybe four hours per day. But if I don’t write for a couple of days in a row, my flow is interrupted.
And that drives me crazy. So this is just the beginning of the conversation. What is flow for me and how it happens with consistently. I want to know how flow happens for you, Crystal Hunt, and how do you deal with it?
Crystal Hunt: Well, as you mentioned, I have historically been a binge writer in the sense that I would write massive amounts in a very compressed period of time.
A lot of my writing time is actually pre-writing, it’s learning my characters and figuring out where the conflict is coming from and, digging into the psychology of the story and how that works, which makes sense, given my background and my approach to storytelling. For me, the flow comes in a multitude of different activities.
It isn’t just the writing. I definitely find flow in a lot of the business side activities as well. If I’m in a phase of gathering keywords for ads, anytime I can drop into something and do it for more than about an hour or two, it comes in those longer stretches. And usually it feels great. You just lose track of space and time, and you are so into what you’re doing that things just click in, in my brain in a different way and I feel like I have a much deeper level of understanding of whatever I’m working on when I can really get into it and then just keep going until it’s finished, which obviously isn’t Functional. If you’re writing a hundred thousand word epic fantasy you need to eat, sleep, have your life in all of those things.
I think part of why I write shorter stuff is actually because I can then do it like that. And that does really work for me. I’m working on adjusting so that I can do that on a more regular basis. And so the way that I could get into that state of flow more often is by adjusting some of the things in my life that prevented and some of the things that support it and trying to turn the dial down on the first one and up on the second one.
And that’s my current mission is because the way that that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about flow is basically a state of focused in enjoyment. And my I’m doing a joy project where I’m trying to put the joy back in the writing and make it fun and not just business.
And so part of doing that has been chasing that flow state because that really is when it’s super fun for me. I love that feeling of being so immersed in what you’re doing, that you’re just completely absorbed. And so as far as the, how I… that was one of the questions that came up in last nights. Just one thing session, we were talking about this book in the Creative Academy, and one of the questions people wanted to know was how often can you get into a flow state? And we talked about that as a group and the answers, really varied. And for me, it used to be two times a year when it came to writing over the Christmas vacation and August, because I usually booked off of all my other consulting work and everything else for the month of August and for a month over the Christmas holidays.
And so for me, I had to figure out, what was it about those break times that let me just drop right into it and write a book or even two books over a vacation time like that. And so that was an interesting thing to think about. So, Michele, for you thinking about what prevents you from getting into a state of flow?
Like when you can’t do it, you’ve mentioned that when you don’t do it daily, you have a really hard time maintaining that, what things are there that pull you out of that flow or that make it hard to hit that state for you?
Getting into flow state and what can stop you from getting there
Michele Amitrani: So I have mentioned my routine that I tried to defend as much as I can. One thing that I’ve noticed every single time I start a writing project if before going to bed, I have an idea of what I’m going to do the day after the flow is going to be established more easily. At least for me. Now, I’m not the plotter, I’m a pantser, so 95% of the time I don’t know where I’m going when I start writing a sentence.
But I do think of what it might be that sentence the night before, or at least most of the time, I try to think of that. I’m going to give you an example of what an ideal writing session for Michele Amitrani is going to be. Now that we are in summer in Italy, I wake up around five in the morning, because it’s cool. So I can write it without melting. I will brush my teeth. I will do what I need to do. So for some exercise for 30 to 45 minutes, then I will start writing.
Now, one thing that I did the night before was, on the table then I’m going to write there need to be nothing of not my Mac Book Pro, which is basically the instrument, the tool that I use to write. So that, that reminds me that I have woke up three or four hours before a normal person, because I need to get stuff done. So I open my Mac put the password, and then I start a Scrivener file. Immediately after I set up an alarm clock for one hour on my iPhone.
I cannot do anything else if not writing for that hour. I will write the alarm will sound and I will stop. If everything goes well, or we want to write more. So immediately after the alarm sounds, maybe after five minutes, I will start a new alarm for an hour. Again, this is an ideal session. Not always goes like this. Then I will write the alarm with sound again and that means that I have two hours in the bank.
Ideally, if after two hours the alarm sound, ideally that writing day for me is done. Like I’m happy with that. Two hours is the minimum. Now, why is this important when we talk about flow? Because I know I cannot enter a state of flow, meaning writing something that makes sense to me in that two hour span, without doing this number of things.
So waking up at that hour. Mind you, if I wake up at six 30 or seven already the flow it’s foggy because my mind knows it’s not five 30, it’s not six. You lost some time. People are going to wake up around you. There’re going to be noises. there’s going to be that kind of stuff. So I need to wake up at a certain time because I know that then.
And when I have those two hours of peace or silence, whatever you want to call it. Another thing that I do. Which is I found out not very much recommended in Italy, and I’ll tell you later why, is to turn off my cell phone, like internet, WhatsApp, or that kind of stuff. So if people want to reach me, they can’t reach me.
Just my wife can reach me because she lives in my home. And that drives my mother crazy. She will say, why is your cell phone always turn off. The joy of going back. But this is important, is because I want to protect these two hours of writing time, as much as I can. This is how I protect my writing time, but this is also I describe my flow.
And this is how I answer your question: What prevents you from getting into the state of flow? Not doing all the things that gets me into the state of flow. This not to be said that if there are not all of these circumstances, I can’t write. I can write anywhere I want, but I do know that these two hours are of fundamental importance because they are going to be a baseline, the bedrock of all of my production, non-fiction and fiction wise.
These things prevent me from getting into the state of flow: not having a time restraint meaning not setting my time clock. Because I don’t write, I don’t write how many words I’ve written in a day, but how much time I have devoted to the writing activity, and i’ve a note book that says with weird lines, every single hours that I spent in the last year and a half a year eight months, actually. So I know exactly to the minute, how many hours I wrote, because this is what gets me to the floor. The fact that I will have to manually write how many hours I wrote today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. I get into my state of flow by be accountable with myself.
I know that you already mentioned some of the things that gets you into the state of flow or prevents you into getting into the state of your flow. What are the things that you think Crystal Hunt, are likely to get you there? So get you into a positive state of flow.
Crystal Hunt: Well, It’s just, I’m going to just go back to the negative for a minute.
So there’s a few other things that I think can really pull us out of flow. And so removing barriers is always the first step before you put in the positive things of how you’re going to get there. So I think Michele’s is illustration was really great at pointing out like distraction of any kind can really prevent you from being in flow. If there’s noises that are unpredictable in their frequency or that, if you’re a parent, you have kids you’ll know there’s a different kind of shriek or cry, then immediately pierces any concentration you have. It’s like, okay, somebody is injured or fighting or whatever.
And there’s that, that certain tone that you learn to recognize that just yanks right out of whatever you’re focused on, because they tend to need intervention to prevent harm in that stage. And that is something that’s programmed in. Michele mentioned turning off his phone. So notifications binging at you, whether it’s desktop notifications or phone notifications.
So I am very strict about turning off those during writing time. Any fractured attention that you have, or if you’re task hopping. So you’re trying to right a bit, but then you’re also checking your email every few minutes, or you’re bouncing between maybe writing and monitoring social media accounts.
That it’s really hard to fully drop into flow if you are task hopping between things. I find undone to dues, like things that I am responsible for that may impact other people are a huge preventative barrier for me getting into flow. If I know that for example, I’m going to teach a class later that day and if I don’t a hundred percent know that everything is prepped and ready already, even if I know I have hours in the afternoon to finish whatever needs finishing are to review my notes before the class, I still have a hard time dropping into that state. So my brain is just yeah, but there’s things other people need from you.
You should be responsible for those. And so I have a hard time overriding that. I’m practicing. I’m getting better, but it is definitely that is a challenge for me. And I think also that inner critic voice really can prevent us from getting into a state of flow. if we are too self-conscious as we were writing that first draft, or if you’re at the stage of your writing career, where you’re not a hundred percent confident in your skills, so basically most people that write, it can really contribute to you not being able to lose yourself in the work.
That, that monitor that lives in your brain is constantly saying, for fiction it’s maybe just, oh, you’re not getting your ideas across the way you wanted, or like that character is not believable or, can’t you write better dialogues in that? Whatever nasty little commentary or inner critic likes to throw in your lap when you’re trying to write stuff. I think that’s a big barrier and the imposter syndrome is another.
And for non-fiction, this can definitely be a thing where, you don’t feel like you’re an expert enough to write the books and you, maybe you don’t feel like you should be the one giving advice to everybody, but you really feel passionate about sharing what you know, and there’s a gap in the knowledge that has been shared by other people.
So even when you know, it would be really helpful for other people to have that information, it can still be tricky to quiet that imposter syndrome voice in the back of your brain, as you are sitting there at your desk and I think all of those things can prevent you from getting into state of flow as well as physical discomfort.
And if you are noticing your body too much when you’re writing, maybe you’ve had an injury, maybe your back just gets sore when you sit for too long, maybe your chair is uncomfortable or the way that your workstation is set up. A lot of people talk about keyboard comfort. And, if you have the right keyboard setup for the size of your hands and the way that your wrists can angle and things like that. So finding a comfortable keyboard is huge.
So we take all those negatives and we flip them on their head and we talk about what are the positives that we can introduce to override that’s something I’ve really been thinking about because I would have thought that deadlines were required to help me get into flow because it used to always be, as I was coming up to a deadline, would of course need to be totally focused to hit that. I am historically very good at hitting deadlines, but I’m not very good at hitting them really far in advance. And I think a lot of that was due to a completely overloaded schedule, which I have managed to get under control. And that has been really interesting as my time opens up I have come to realize it wasn’t actually the deadlines that made it so effective at getting into flow when that was approaching. I started looking at what were the other conditions in play, and it turns out that when I knew I had a huge deadline approaching, I would completely clear my schedule of everything else. No meetings, I would make sure I had a break from teaching, I would completely block off the whole week or two or three, depending on how big of a deadline it was and how big the project was to make sure that I had enough time to finish it properly. And if you were listening earlier and you heard me talk about how I used to just drop into a state of flow, as soon as vacation started in the summer, and then over the winter holidays, those were my big writing times.
And guess what they had in common? No meetings, no teaching, nothing else scheduled in a day that I felt like I needed to be prepared for or responsible for. And so I’ve been looking at how do I recreate that in my life? And it’s taken a couple of years to really pair back a lot of those activities and shift my schedule and adjust my commitments so that they could clear larger chunks of time where I wasn’t responsible for anyone else’s things.
And the circumstances that basically pulled together for that, I run through a bit of a checklist when I’m going to sit down for a writing session. So do I have everything I’m going to need on hand? So I tend to be pretty physical in my writing process where I’ll have notes that I write on paper when I’m trying to work something out in my brain as I go and I will have usually character outlines and books that are bookmarked or have little sticky tabs in them for different aspects of things. And I really like to have that stuff to hand, where if I hit something that might interrupt the flow there’s no need to get up and go look for that book or see where was my map that I drew of whatever house they’re in.
I have all that stuff right beside me. So there’s no need to interrupt the flow of what I’m doing. If I need to reference something, it’s right there in front of me. So do I have everything i need? Your water, your tea, all of that kind of stuff. You want to have just enough that you can keep going, not so much that you never get a break to stand up and stretch because it is important physically not to be making yourself uncomfortable.
I’m right there with Michele on the do not disturb on my phone. And I was super resistant to this at first. Because there, I have a kid, so that’s a thing you want to make sure that you’re available, even though she’s a grown up now, I still, if she needs something, I want to be able to answer the phone. The door buzzer comes through my phone, which means that if we’re getting a package or something. So the way around that is that you can program in certain numbers to bypass your do not disturb. So I put, three or four key people and the door buzzer code in so that I won’t feel like, oh, I know we have a delivery coming and it’s not going to come if I don’t answer the phone. Then yes, I know that it will come through so I can relax and not worry about missing out on anything or not being available in an actual emergency. So that is something that, that you can do.
I also have started setting timers. So we talked about earlier, like I have, if I know I’m teaching a class later, or I know I have a meeting at noon or whatever it is, my brain will be constantly trying to track the time in the back of my mind, because I know that when I drop into a state of flow, I completely lose track of time.
I have no idea if one hour or six hours has passed and I am perfectly capable of writing for very long time at a stretch, which is it feels vaguely dangerous in the sense that I’m completely unaware of my surroundings. And so I will set a timer for half an hour or an hour before whatever the activity is, so that I know I have enough time to do whatever reviewing of my notes, I need, or have some tea and some lunch or whatever that’s going to be before the next thing. And my subconscious knows that a timer was set and I can trust that. And so I will then be able to really focus. Like Michele mentioned earlier, knowing ahead of time, what I’m going to be writing is really important.
I am, in fiction, very much a discovery writer. So I plan the overall structure of the book, but only at a very high level. And then all of the details and the little things I discover as I go along, which keeps it interesting. And I have found if I plan too much, I can’t get into a state of flow. And the book Flow talks about how you need a certain level of interest and a certain level of challenge and newness in tasks in order to feel like it’s worth attending to, and for it to really engage you. And one of the ways you can do that is by tracking metrics on things. And so Michele talked about putting, sticks down for each hour spent writing, and that is the way, even though the activity is the same every day, you’re always writing, you’re changing what you’re writing about, and you’re also keeping tracks.
So you’re turning it into a game almost where you are challenging yourself to show up every day. And that is one of the characteristics or one of the ways of getting into the flow. So if know roughly what you’re going to do, the next session, when you sit down, it’s really helpful. So I do plan the night before I’m going to write this section of the book tomorrow and I will then start with that and I’ll do as much as I can and if something happens or I get really stuck, I hop to the next section. I don’t stop and try to figure out what’s there. So I get all the way through something. I can go back and fill in the holes and suddenly the holes are quite easy. It’s the same strategy as some… actually I think it was my mom who taught me about this in school was that if I was taking a test, go through and answer every question that you’re super confident about, because then you’re going to get the bulk of what you know out of your brain, and onto the page in a way that you’re really comfortable with. And you’re going to answer the most questions you possibly can, and then you go back and then you start tackling the harder ones.
And anything you’re super stuck on you leave for the very end. So that gives you the best possible chance of answering the most questions in the time you have available to do that. That test, whatever it was, an exam or whatnot, so that I actually took forward into my writing. And when I can easily picture a scene and it’s flowing, I will just keep writing through it.
And if I hit something that I’m really not sure about, I just hop to the next section in Scrivener. And I leave that, I put a little tag on that one that just has a little yellow dot and that means I need to come back to it after so that I can just keep that energy going forward, which is yeah, it’s a really nice way to not let the stuck kind of grab you and drag you down into the lightening sand. Nobody needs that.
And Breaking things into a small enough chunk that you can sprint for the finish line with whatever time you do have available is a great way to do it. It’s that internal motivator. If you say, okay, I’m going to tackle a chapter or I’m going to work on this particular short story, or I just want to nail this scene, whatever it is, if it’s something where you can see the end in sight, then you’re more likely to just push through so you can hit that finish line, which is really satisfying. Being physically comfortable, we talked about, so finding a keyboard that works for you or making sure that wherever you’re using your laptop or your desktop computer, that the chair you have is at least it doesn’t have to be a fancy chair, but it’s at least comfortable enough that you aren’t distracted from your writing by the discomfort you’re feeling with your chair.
I will use a device that has no other distractions on it because I had my whole business, everything in my life was run out of my laptop. It means that the icons on the desktop and all of the things there’s too much in there. And I associate that piece of machinery with too many other things besides just writing.
So when I’m drafting, I use a standalone keyboard and I drop my little phone into it or an iPad depending what is available at the time. And that way I’m just typing. Ot doesn’t do all the other things and then of course, I’m in do not disturb mode, so the notifications are off. So that’s not a problem. And the last thing that I’ve found really helps is I actually listen to a single song on repeat usually for the entire time I write a book and my brain learns the pattern of it, and then I stop hearing it but then when I go to sit down at my writing session, I can put on my headphones or turn on the speaker and hit play and it immediately shifts brainwaves into that zone. And that is probably the best trick that I have ever learned.
I’m a behavioural psychologist so I totally get it. I’m basically turning Pavlov’s dog experiment on myself, except instead of ringing a bell, we’re playing music, and instead of getting a dog eating, we are writing stories. After a while I… one of the books I was writing, I forget which book, but I realized that I was putting my headphones on and I wasn’t even hitting play.
I actually didn’t even have the music running anymore. I could hear it in my head, but it wasn’t actually turned on. I had just programmed my brain to make that white noise on its own, and that was really interesting, but I always choose a piece of music that sets the tone for whatever book I’m writing.
So often my fiction books have a song associated with them as a theme song. And that’s usually the one that I listened to on repeat the whole time that I’m writing. So that is a good trick to train your brain of when you’re switching gears is to have some signal. And for me, the signal just happened to be auditory because I needed to block out the noise that was happening around me in my apartment and in our neighbourhood and if I had the headphones on, it worked as noise canceling, and then it also fed in a certain sort of stimulus on repeat.
So Michele, do you ever listen to music while you’re writing?
What is your auditory setup while you’re doing it?
Removing distractions that take you out of flow
Michele Amitrani: I was smiling while you were relating the single song and repeat because actually I did try that for the first time a few, I’d say a couple of months ago, three months ago when the last of my mythological fantasy story was driving me crazy.
I was rewriting it for the fourth time. And I don’t know exactly why I might have heard this from some source. I can’t remember, but I just took my headphones, the first song that I add on a playlist, which I usually don’t do. I don’t usually listen to songs when I’m writing and then I just hit replay the same song.
I don’t even know the name of the song. I just know that it’s 3 minutes and 58 seconds, something like that. And I don’t know why exactly, but this did help me push forward so that the fourth draft was actually the last version of the story then now I’m happy with. I don’t know the psychology behind it. I don’t know the science. I just know that it did help me focus more on the story. And I found myself a lot when you were saying that this method focalized every single time this song started, my brain was more like, okay, this is a writing time, buddy, so you better just give 100% of whatever you got.
And If I click now and see how many time I’ve listened to this 3 minutes and 58 second song. It’s 858 times. I don’t even know because I don’t know the math. I just know that I really listened to this so many times. So I definitely relate to that. I also suggest people that are maybe stuck to try this.
It might be weird the first 13 times, but after you push forward that to the three-digit number, so you 100 or 101 you’re not going to be listening to the music anymore. You’re just going to know that this is writing time, your brain will know that this is writing time. I would probably use this again if I ever got in a similar situation.
But another thing that I was thinking was we mentioned two kinds of writers, the binge writer, and the writer who is a bit more consistent in her or his writing, but we didn’t really talk about the other two kinds of writers the discovery writers (pantser) or the plotter. And I do think this also might relate somehow to the flow.
I think it will be different if you’re a plotter or if you’re a pantser. The first has the advantage of being able to knowing where they’re going and the latter and I talk for personal experience he or she will not be able to rely on that, maybe more on gut feeling.
Sometimes it will serve him or her well. Sometimes not so well. But I do believe that the flow can be achieved for both these kind of writers. And I think the answer to this again, my 5 cents is establish a routine. Again, even if you are binge writer, just listen to this because I think it might had value.
Not all writers are created equal. We just mentioned four different kinds of writers. If you’re a binge rider some of what I say here might not apply to you. But you might steal something from this, at least you might try something different. I am a writer who writes consistently.
So I write every day. I have no idea what it means to write seven to nine hours per day. No idea how that feels like. But, if I write less per day, two to three hours per day consistently I’m happy. But this is something that I found out that possibly might be used also to other writers.
It’s not that much to establish a routine and stick to it. It’s actually the opposite. Is to test it. I’m on a newsletter of productivity by Nicholas Erik, and one of his last newsletters was about testing routines. And I find that so fascinated that I want to share with you because I think it’s really much on focus if we’re talking about flow, this is something that has served me well: building an habit of consistency. Even though you’re not the writer that writes consistently try to build an habit. Start small. If you can only write 15 minutes, write 15 minutes a day, no matter what. Try to do this for one week to two weeks. If you can hold on to it, meaning if you can ride 15 minutes a day and see that there are good results, so maybe you are writing a scene, then two scenes, then three scenes, then a whole chapter, try to see if you can scale.
And by scale, I don’t mean any more than: from 15 minutes to 20 minutes. If that’s all the time you have. If you can literally write from 15 minutes to 20 minutes per day is completely acceptable. If you’re consistent and you can keep these for another one to two weeks. But if you go from 15 minutes to one hour and start skipping sessions, this is going to be your writing graveyard. Because all the hard work that you did in this couple of weeks for 15 minutes you’re going to basically stop this flow of things. So stick with what you can do. Don’t push too hard. Try to slowly build this writing habit with the minimum amount of time that you need.
If you have 40 minutes, start with just 20, so that it’s easy for you to keep up with your own schedule. I don’t know how it’s going to work for you. It did work well for me on several different writing related projects. But again, the trick for me is the consistency and starting smaller and with less time that you actually have to give yourself momentum and see if that works. Because if it doesn’t work, you need to stop. It’s not like you have to push forward. If I can’t do 15 minutes, I’m a failure. It’s completely not about disappointment. It’s really a test. It’s like you’re testing Amazon ads, or you’re testing a new writing style.
If it doesn’t work for you in this writing 15 minutes or 20 minutes consistent, it’s completely fine. At least you tried. So that’s why we writers, we try different things. I found this to be helpful for me and a number of other writer. But the more you write consistently, the more your writing becomes natural. So if you are more inside the story, and this is one of the objective of this writing consistently, even for 15 to 20 minutes per day, the more the story will reward you. The Muse will reward you But if you write something new and you leave it for two to three weeks, and then you start again, I think the floor will be diluted a bit.
This is what I believe to be important to consider. And the last thing that I will like to say is if you’re writing something, try to read something on that genre but not necessarily only that. A nonfiction book that I’m reading now gave me a great idea for a fantasy book that I’m planning and it came completely from nowhere.
It’s a book about plotting. So you would think like it has nothing to do with Titans and fantasy, but it did give me a great idea for one of those things.
I guess what I’m trying to say is keep your brain in motion. Even if you’re writing something that doesn’t seem linked with your genre or your project, keep it in motion.
And I think that you will be rewarded by great, crazy, weird, ideas, and 10% of this, you will be actually going to be able to implement it to the next story and I think is going to make it stronger and more enjoyable for the reader.
And this is all I have to say about the writing flow and again, the experiment of consistently writing and testing new writing routines.
Do you have something else to add to that, Crystal?
Crystal Hunt: I will add two little caveats. One is that when you’re thinking about writing every day, if you are a binge writer or, a power drafter, we’ll call it where you are getting into it and then you go all in for a shorter period of time. You can still be in your story daily. And so when we say ‘writing’, writing doesn’t always have to mean that the typing out of the words, there’s a lot of writing that happens in the pre-writing phase, where you are figuring out what that scene is going to entail and figuring out what that’s going to look like.
And so if you are easing into a daily writing habit, it may help just to broaden how you think about writing. And if your habit is to spend 15 minutes each day in your story to get started and try to shift towards a more daily kind of habit, then that can be a way to ease into that. And you may still power draft when the time comes, but you will at least have been experimenting and being in your story every day. This is part of what will keep that flow easier to access because you don’t have to relearn your story world.
Michele said, when there’s a break of two or three weeks and you haven’t touched the story in any way, it’s easy to feel like it’s too much work. It becomes a mountain to get back in.
Whereas if you are daily visiting that you are going to be a little more primed to dive back in when you sit down for your bigger sessions. And it may be that your life does not allow this to happen every day, but you can still build a regular habit, which has maybe even two days a week or one day a week when you do have a longer block, maybe you you get a two hour night off once a week from parenting when someone else takes over and you can block that two hours every single week on the same day and have a writing date for yourself. If that’s the case, build, whatever habit you can start from somewhere, you can always expand or extend it later and look at your own schedule and your own abilities, and then pick a habit to try to form in a way that does make sense.
The trick is a hundred percent is easy, anything less than that is hard because it requires a decision. So if it’s Tuesday nights you’re going to write, then a hundred percent of Tuesday nights you want to get yourself writing. Because then it’s not a decision it’s just what you do. And if your habit is a morning, get up and start writing immediately… or even if it’s one sentence is your commitment each morning, then commit to that as your starting place and let it expand as Michele said from there.
The other thing is just an interesting comment on the reading as a way of helping stay in flow or stay in genre. I can read everything in my genre when I’m pre-writing because it’s a great research.
I cannot read while I’m drafting. I can’t read fiction while I’m drafting a fiction book because I will mimic other people’s voices. It pulls me out of my own writer’s voice when I get in someone else’s head, basically. So I’m very careful that I read nonfiction while I’m drafting fiction. And I read fiction while I’m drafting nonfiction, because it prevents me from getting off course in my voice and it lets me stay me.
So if you are somebody who has a good memory, or if you have… I think most of us, whether we know it or not unconsciously absorb accents from people around us when we’re traveling, where the certain lyrical patterns of language, things like that is very unconscious. And so just be aware if you are drafting.
You can use that to your advantage. If you are trying to mimic someone else’s style or to like someone, then you can power read those while you’re drafting, it will help set that in your brain. But if what you’re trying to figure out from our last episode, if you’re trying to figure out your own writing voice, then you’re finding it’s tangled up and you don’t really know what your voice is you might need a little bit of grace and just shift. You can read a different genre. You can read whatever, read something else, but just be aware of the impact on what you’re reading on your voice as you go.
All right. You have a homework mission. Your mission is to think of what is one thing that you could remove from your writing routine that would help you get into flow easier, more often, better.
And what is one thing you could add to your writing routine that would help you get into and stay in flow more often? That is your challenge. One from each category. And we look forward to hearing about your adventures. Remember to hit your subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to the podcast. And if you haven’t signed up for your newsletter, please come to a strategicauthorpreneur.com and you can click on the newsletter button.
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Michele Amitrani: Buy guys, see you.