Mostly, I’m not a writer: I’m living my life and getting on with things. The initial inspiration for his poems seems to arise out of an openness to the life around him, and the ability to ‘recognise’ the promptings of his imagination in response to certain stimuli: I think you get better at recognising it, over time, though, and become more able to sustain the mood. I don’t tend to deliberately try and fall into a state conducive to writing … It’d be good to be able to, but it doesn’t quite work like that. Paul Farley was quite definite on this point when I asked him: Most poets seem to agree with Shelley that “A man cannot say ‘I will compose poetry'”. Satisfying as this is,it is not an experience that can be guaranteed.
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Farley’s description gives us a vivid sense of the engagement of his whole mental, emotional and physical being in the act of writing. This orchestra is a wonderful metaphor for the unifying, organising and harmonising qualities of creative flow. It’s like you’re conducting an orchestra of everything that is the case with you, what you’ve done, who you’ve loved, what you’ve seen and read, all the sensory data you’ve stored: there are different sections which can all play together in concert, which normally wouldn’t. Yes, being ‘in the zone’ when you’re writing well is pleasurable, effortless, and anything can and often does bubble up from God knows where. Paul Farley also found it easy to recognise the experience of flow when I described it to him: It is also interesting to hear Wicks say that she is more likely to experience flow when writing poetry, since poetry has long been ascribed a magical quality that distinguishes it from prose, partly because of the altered state of consciousness which was thought necessary for its composition – as reflected in old-fashioned terms such as poetic ‘inspiration’, ‘trance’ or ‘ecstasy’. This is strikingly similar to Csikszentmihalyi’s description of flow: the emphasis on the ‘right circumstances’, a distorted sense of time, and feelings of intense enjoyment. I certainly lose all sense of time when I’m concentrating, and it’s a luxury to be able to indulge that… At its best it brings a kind of euphoria. It can be, when I’m writing in the right circumstances, and especially when I’m writing poetry.
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I asked Susan Wicks if her experience of writing was anything like Asimov’s or Coward’s: To which most writers would probably add “sometimes”. Or as Noel Coward put it more pithily, “Work is more fun than fun”. Csikszentmihalyi distinguishes flow from mere indulgence in pleasure (which is typically short-lived and unsatisfying) and characterises it as ‘autotelic’ – an end in itself.
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The elements of creative flow include: clear goals a balance between challenges and skills total absorption in the task a distorted sense of time and an absence of distractions, worry and selfconsciousness. He defines flow as “an automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness”, which results from stretching our abilities in the pursuit of a meaningful challenge. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi uses the term ‘flow’ to describe the state of absorption in the creative process. For this article I spoke to some leading contemporary poets and trawled through the writings of past masters, as well as dipping a toe in the waters of psychology, to see what I could learn about the elusive joy of writing. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.” On the other hand, there must be some pleasure in the act of writing, especially for poets, since most of us are certainly not in it for the money and there are surer routes to fame.
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How often do writers talk about their work as something enjoyable? Perhaps I’m being unfair, but the more typical response seems to be this one from Peter de Vries: “I love being a writer. Years ago I read that Isaac Asimov couldn’t wait to sit down at his writing desk in the morning and had to be dragged away from it at night because he was enjoying himself so much.