I hope your holidays were restful and bright. This week still doesn’t feel quite like a work week, but I’m told that agents and editors are back on the job, so writers must be, too!
It’s been awhile since we did a Write On! Roundup, so this seems like a good way to kick off the year, especially since a recent question from Ancestory zeroed in on the elusive Zone that all creative people crave— the state of mind “where everything around you is transformed into grist for your creative mill. We all know the feeling. It's a particular form of inspiration where you can find treasure in the streets and people around you. They propel your writing and find their way onto the page.”
As we transition out of the holidays and back to our writing routines, I thought one resolution we all might share would be to spend more time in the Zone this year. With that in mind, I thought I’d devote this Roundup to Ancestory’s main concern:
”Because I have a job and a family it's hard to get into the writing Zone. Have you found any good ways to access it?”
What happens in the Zone?
The first order of business here is to clarify what we’re talking about when we talk about the Zone. In particular, I want to distinguish it from Flow, because both of these mindsets are essential for writers to cultivate, and they’re easily confused but very different.
Flow deserves a whole post or two to itself, as it’s your direct conduit to productivity. When you’re in flow, you are transported inside your work, as if by magic and away from the external world. First identified in 1990 by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow is the state of total immersion that makes creativity a reward in itself. It’s not unique to writers, but every serious writer knows the joy of slipping into Flow and emerging several hours — and pages of new work — later, feeling as if no time has passed at all. And while there are no guarantees, the quality of work produced in Flow often soars above anything you will write while gritting your teeth and watching the clock.
The Zone, in contrast, infuses your external life with your writing mind. When you’re in the Zone, you’re wide open to inspiration. You can be in the Zone at the grocery store, waiting in the pick-up line for your kids, or swimming, jogging, showering, or sleeping. What happens in the Zone juices your writing by generating ideas and observations, even when no actual composition takes place. In essence, the Zone is your gateway to Flow.
Together, the Zone and Flow can fill most of a writing life. I have a few friends, especially poets, who are almost always in the Zone, except when they’re in Flow! But the rising tide of 21st- century distractions, from pandemic hangover and political menace to the sirens of social media, make it harder and harder to sustain the creative focus that these mindsets require, even for those without young children or competing jobs. So, let’s consider some strategies for securing this focus.
I’m going to divide these into five metaphorical steps that will help you access the Zone.
1. Maintain your toolkit
We all have Great Thoughts. They wing through our minds like lightning and often vanish just as quickly. When we’re in the Zone, they can come in blizzards that are utterly useless unless we record them. So, in preparation, make sure you’ve assembled a recording toolkit, and keep it with you at all times.
If you’re like 99.9% of humanity, you probably carry your smartphone with you wherever you go. You might want to get comfortable with its voice memo app. You can then add a transcription app, which will allow you to talk your way to digital notes.
If you’re like me, however, and all that digital clutter gives you a debilitating headache, you might prefer Anne Lamott’s old-school tools:
I have index cards and pens all over the house—by the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, by the phones, and I have them in the glove compartment of my car. I carry one with me in my back pocket when I take my dog for a walk. In fact, I carry it folded lengthwise, if you need to know, so that, God forbid, I won’t look bulky. You may want to consider doing the same.
If you spend thoughtful hours in pools or weather that renders ordinary phones and index cards useless, you might want to invest in their waterproof versions. I once swam at a Y where a writer set his pad and pen on the pool deck at the end of his lane every day before starting his laps because he knew they’d deliver him to his Zone.
Even if you’re not writing whole scenes or chapters, when you’re in the Zone you’ll still be taking life dictation.
2. Clear the table
Trying to enter the Zone when your mind is messy or distracted is like trying to serve an appetizing meal on a table that’s crowded with dirty plates, piles of paperwork, and half-finished take-out containers. You’ve got to clear the table so you can pay attention to the good stuff that’s coming.
For most of us, this means going offline. Exit all social media. Silence or, better yet, turn off your phone. Ignore your incoming texts and emails. Be present.
Many writers then use meditation as a portal to both the Zone and Flow. Here’s Dani Shapiro on her daily practice:
Yes, it’s hard. Yes, I resist — oh, how I resist. But I feel the difference, the space inside me that I can only access when I crack open the door to the infinite quiet. Wherever I am — if only I get out of my own way, remove myself however briefly from the noise and chatter — I am able to return home.
My own method of clearing the decks is easier than meditation, but it does the job. I do sudokus. They’re quick. They’re challenging and satisfying — at least, when I get them right. These puzzles are scientifically proven to be good exercise for the brain. I also find it rejuvenating to trade the world of words for the language of numbers for this brief period every day. But the real benefit of sudoku is that it resets my focus, directing all attention to a concentrated task and pushing other distractions away. When I close my sudoku book, I’m ready to approach the Zone.
3. Prime the pump
Sometimes when you get to this stage of the process, ideas will start spontaneously flying. Lucky you.
My creative process, alas, tends to require more direction. And the best way I know to orient inspiration is by reading.
If you’re just getting started on a new project, or if your creative well has run dry, prime the pump with great work by other writers. Poetry is an excellent choice, since its language tends to be concise and evocative. So are novels, stories, and nonfiction in your genre or subject area. My only firm requirement here is excellence. This is not the moment to read your friend’s first draft or a book that bores or irritates you. This sacred reading time should be spent on texts that dazzle and encourage by reminding you that even the most beautiful, powerful books in the world are written word by word.
Alternatively, if you have work in progress, you can orient your entry into the Zone by reading over yesterday’s progress, a la Hemingway:
The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day, read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.
Once you finish this review, identify a handful of issues or questions that still need resolving. Wherever the Zone takes you next, whether to your desk or to the gym or market — or to sleep — those questions will settle into your subconscious and get busy taking root.
4. Distill the juice
By now, hopefully, you’re well into the Zone, and this mindset will carry you forward. When I was working on my second novel, Cloud Mountain, I was in the Zone almost all the time. I specifically remember picking my son up from school one day and taking him to his tennis lesson as I was trying to puzzle out a scene from the marriage odyssey early in the book. I fixed the whole scene on note cards as I sat on a bench overlooking the courts.
And that is hardly a unique experience. Take it from award-winning novelist Susan Straight:
For 24 years I wrote not while driving but while waiting in parking lots for hours — basketball and tennis and doctor appointments and hospitals, Girl Scouts and plays, driving exams and prom nights (2 a.m.! A whole chapter!), writing in my notebooks.
But even if you’re not mapping out whole scenes or chapters, when you’re in the Zone you’ll still be taking life dictation. You’ll notice the accents and turns of phrase that ignite conversations around you. You’ll find the perfect word for that exact shade of magenta in the barrista’s hair. You’ll make associations between the smell of bleach in the passing orderly’s coat and the particular dread you feel as you enter the hospital. In the Zone, everything becomes grist for the mill.
This includes your interactions and conversations. In the Zone, your friends and family members can help you crowdsource ideas and solutions. Raise a topic related to your work, and your kid’s reply might suggest an angle you hadn’t considered for your story. Imagine your real family dealing with the problems in your plot, and filter your scene through their quirks and personalities. Even if these observations and flights of fancy don’t yield obvious or direct ideas for your work, they’ll limber up your sense of the possibilities and provide new juice.
And if your next stop is sleep, they’ll fertilize your subconscious, so it can be extra productive overnight.
In essence, the Zone is your gateway to Flow.
5. Protect the evidence
Speaking of sleep, it’s vital that you keep your toolkit close to your bed so you can jot down messages from your subconscious. Every now and then, you’ll wake up with a keeper.
That happened to me in 2003, when I was struggling to find the human story at the core of the novel that would become Glorious Boy. As I described this dream in LitHub:
On a tropical island during an emergency evacuation, a young girl was hiding in a dense rainforest with a small, mute white boy in her care. The girl, local to this island, knew the boy’s parents would not take her with them. She was hiding out of equal parts jealousy and spite. Only when the noise outside died down would she and the child emerge to find the streets abandoned, spectral plumes of smoke rising in the distance, and the little boy’s parents gone. Only then would the girl realize what she had done.
That phantom girl’s panic woke me up at 2am; I knew I had to capture this story. My bedside pad was too small and the light too dim, so I got up and went down to my office. I wrote the whole scene out in as much detail as I could remember. It would take another seven years for me to figure out exactly when, where, and why this evacuation too place and how it set up the novel, but I held onto the notes from that first night and returned to them often to get back into the Zone that had produced the dream in the first place.
And that is the last important step in cultivating the Zone: protect the evidence and have some sort of system for filing your records of these flashing thoughts. But remember, that system need only be as organized as you are.
My office is a jumble of notebooks, bulletin boards, file cabinets, and drawers full of journals. No one else on the planet would be able to locate the notes I need in there, but I can generally go right to them.
When I can’t find them easily, I do curse and vow to create a better system. But the funny thing is that I often find, once I do recover those lost notes, that I remember pretty much everything in them. What secured those ideas in my mind was being in the Zone enough to write them down in the first place!
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Great suggestions!
This step-by-step guide is really helpful to me as I'm preparing myself mentally to start writing a novel. I'm curious about the name of the voice note-taking app/transcription app. Would you mind sharing it?
I'm really inspired by your ability to take notes and write scenes even during the time you were caring for young children. I often stop short of plunging into the zone or flow because of my mental health issues. I'm going to try implementing these steps so I will limit the "excuses" I give myself for not writing.