When I was thinking of what to write for this blog, I knew only that I wanted to incorporate the Winter Olympics. After all, they happen only once every four years, and I have found myself caught up in so many of the individual stories. But what could I say about writing? I thought about approaching the story through the lens of a sportswriter, a profession I briefly pursued, and sharing the lessons that carried over to academic writing. Yet a coherent story was not coming together. It’s a feeling that so many of us know.
Rather than force an idea, I simply let myself reflect on the Olympics with no predetermined goal and jotted down my thoughts in a stream-of-conscious fashion. The words that emerged—some in sentences, some in fragments, starting and stopping and starting again—did, in fact, revolve around a common idea, my love for winter sports, which in turn pointed to an obvious thread that had been there all along: the mystery and joy of finding a flow state.
There’s something special about the Winter Olympics. It’s not just the idealism of the Olympic spirit, but it’s the whole backdrop: the majesty of the mountains, the quiet beauty of the snow-covered ski village, the confrontation with the sublime, the extreme, awe-inspiring, daring of the athletes. For me, winter sports are also nostalgic. Watching them, I am transported back to the first time I ever skated, as a three-year-old on a pond near my house, and reminded of the joy, the calm, that I felt for nearly two decades afterward every time I laced up my skates as a hockey player. Even now, when I skate, the outside world—time itself—fades away, and I hear only the skate blades cutting through the ice.
Such an experience, I realized, is akin to a flow state. Athletes often talk about the feeling of being in a flow state—or being in the zone, as others call it—which is characterized by an inner peace and clarity, the ability simply to do. Along with this comes a feeling of euphoria. Accessing this place seems all the more significant for those winter Olympians who stare down the grandeur of the mountains and dive head over heels, often literally, into harm’s way.
Writers, too, dream of being in the zone, when words flow with ease and outside distractions disappear. While the same threat to life and limb may not be present for the academic writer (though the stakes can be great for the sharing of highly consequential research), there are parallels between the disparate contexts.
Perhaps it sounds like a magical manifestation when athletes talk about a flow state, but the reality is that it takes years and years of practice, of iterating, of innovating, of honing the relevant skills to be able to reach a point where passion, talent, and preparation merge into peak performance. Both athletes and commentators have used the phrase “being unconscious” to discuss a superb performance, but that does something of a disservice to the preparation that goes into it, which, in the critical moments, renders extraneous thought unnecessary.
Academic writing is, assuredly, a conscious activity, a pursuit driven by the mind and not by physical dexterity, and yet the processes are not all that different. Writing, too, takes many hours of reading, researching, thinking. But most of all, it takes lots of writing. Viewers of the Olympics see only the final performance, not the long hours of training and the countless falls along the way. Likewise for the writer, readers do not see draft after draft, new document after new document, that go into a final product. The best writers, like those figure skaters who float gracefully through the air, make it look easy, effortless. It is anything but.
Training oneself to write means finding a routine and sticking to it; for some, this might mean writing every day (Stephen King, for example, famously writes thousands of words a day in a workmanlike routine). For others, the routine might not be so rigid, but the key is to make writing a habitual activity, so that the mind will be trained to recognize the signals that it is time to write. It could be through music, through lighting or environment, or through a dedicated block of time. Eventually, the mind becomes so attuned to the process that it becomes almost subconscious. The conditions, in other words, are right for getting in the writerly zone.
That doesn’t mean that every day and everything you write will be good; no matter how much you practice, no matter how much you’re inspired, sometimes things just don’t work out. If you’ve watched the Olympics, then you’re well aware that practice is no guarantee of success on the biggest stage. It’s a mental game, and when something is just a little off, things can go awry.
Unlike Olympians, academics don’t have to deal with cameras thrust into their faces, the cruel spectacle of judgment and scrutiny in their lowest moments. Still, mental blocks, dead end ideas, and rejected pieces of writing can be devastating for writers. But experimentation and failure are part of the process, steps that can bring us to something better. What matters is being persistent. For every good draft, there are several (or several dozen) bad ones.
While there are plenty of practical tips out there on how you can get into a flow state as a writer, the peak experience itself is rare. An interesting exercise is to think about if and when you’ve experienced something similar, in any context, and to put yourself back in that place and see if you can learn anything from it, just as you can learn from mistakes. Because even if we can’t always achieve it, we can cultivate an environment that gives us the best chance of succeeding, even in the face of failure, and perhaps the best conditions to maximize that flow state when it does happen.
If the Olympics can teach us anything, it’s that the journey itself matters. So many Olympians overcome incredible odds, persevere through setback after setback, to reach the summit of their sports. Even then, ultimately, most Olympic athletes will not medal, but that does not make them failures. Most of the things we write will not be published or even read by anyone else. But in the long run, these are steps, not end points, and they are all a part of a continuing journey. It’s up to us to embrace the process and see it through, and if we’re lucky, we’ll find our zone, our own flow state, more than once along the way.
