I’m sure you’ve felt it once or twice. Maybe as you hammered away at the last thousand words of a college paper just before it was due. Maybe after spending all day at work with a juicy scene bubbling away in the back of your mind, when you finally had a chance to sit down and write it, and the words poured onto the page. In those moments of complete absorption in your work, the rest of the world became a fog at the edges of your vision. Maybe it even vanished completely. And maybe, for a little while, you did too.
Well, not all of you. If you’re lucky enough to have experienced a moment like the ones I described, then clearly part of you, the part that remembers that experience, must have been aware. But the part that knows who you are, your sense of self, was absent. In that moment, you achieved a state that people usually rely on meditation, drugs, or adrenaline to reach. You convinced your inner voice, that mental commentator which constantly evaluates your life, to be quiet.
This self-less state is something many writers keenly desire. It protects us from so many of the thoughts that make writing difficult. Doubts and imposter syndrome, thoughts of toilets needing cleaning, fantasies about what you’ll say when you’re awarded your Pulitzer — these are all thoughts about the self, mental simulations of your own life, however far-fetched they might be, and they’re incredibly common. Where do they come from, and why is it so hard to stop them?
The Default Mode Network and Flow
These self-referential thoughts are associated with the Default Mode Network1, a group of regions in the human brain that are especially active when the mind isn’t engaged in any particular task. You can confirm this idea for yourself; stop reading and close your eyes for a minute or two, and see what kinds of thoughts bubble up in that silence. In that state of rest, you’ll probably have either thoughts of your own past or future, or daydreams completely divorced from reality, both the domain of the DMN.
In general, the more focused you are on a task, the less active your DMN will be, and the fewer of those self-referential thoughts you’ll have. When your attention is utterly absorbed in what you’re doing, those thoughts will be completely absent. In psychology, that merging or attention and task is known as a flow state. You could consider flow to be the opposite state of mind to the self-referential daydream.
The research on flow tells us that it happens most commonly in tasks with specific goals and rules, and which provide immediate feedback on your performance.2 If you’re playing an instrument, for example, and hit a wrong note, you have an instant, visceral reaction to it. In games, digital or analog, clear rules and win conditions make it possible to focus completely on your pursuit of victory. These factors keep your attention anchored to the present moment, and prevent it from wandering off into daydreams.
Finding Flow in Writing
Compared to these more structured activities, writing is decidedly not conducive to flow. The rules that govern storytelling, if they exist, are complex, and porous with caveats and exceptions. The goal of writing a book is usually to finish it, but only you can decide when you have. Feedback on your writing is often ambiguous, and even potentially damaging if taken too seriously too soon.
This may be why writing fast can help to reach a flow state. It introduces a simpler set of rules. Rather than worrying about the quality of the writing you produce, you judge success or failure based something quantitative, like a word count or time limit. Feedback can be immediate; if your fingers stop moving, that’s bad, and as long as the words are flowing, you’re doing well. By adding a new, more concrete set of constraints to replace the old, hazy ones, you can make writing more like those conventional flow activities.
An Alternative Approach
Not all flow states result from following that formula, though. There is one common activity which produces a state of complete absorption without needing rules, a goal, or even any sense of failure or success, and it’s already intimately related to writing. It is, of course, reading.
When you’re immersed in the world of a book, your mind is engaged in a detailed simulation of its contents. Sensory descriptions conjure imagined sensations; you see the black stones of the fortress, you smell the sweet rot of the waterlogged drawbridge, you feel the wet chill in the air as you pass under the portcullis.
Not so different from a fantasy about winning a Pulitzer, is it? More vivid, certainly, because your mind can rely on the words on the page to feed it information, to maintain the dream, but it’s a similar sort of mental simulation. And in fact, both reading fiction and those pesky self-referential thoughts seem to use the same neurological mechanism. Unlike other focused tasks, reading fiction doesn’t suppress activity in the default mode network, it actually enhances it.3
The DMN is theorized to be responsible for stitching our memories into a cohesive narrative. It is, in other words, our internal storyteller. It holds mental models of the world, and runs simulations of past events and future possibilities. When we read, we let the book hijack our default mode network, and use it to simulate another world, another life, instead of our own.
Writing might work the same way; by taking control of the mechanism we use to tell the story of own world and using it to build a fictional one, instead. It also seems like we can only use that mechanism for one thing at a time. The more you think about yourself, the less you can focus on your writing. The more absorbed you are in your work, the quieter the sense of self becomes. If that’s true, then the vanishing self isn’t just a pleasant side effect of your work as a writer, but an imperative. If you want to be writing at your best, you need complete use of your tools.
Three Ways to Disappear
The trouble is that those self referential thoughts, which build the narrative of our lives, are, evidently, the default mode. Left to its own devices, we can expect our minds to return to them. How do we maintain focus on our fiction, rather than ourselves?
I’ve come up with three strategies to approach this issue.
First, we can ensure that the content of our writing will keep the default mode network busy enough that it will have no opportunity to slip into its accustomed thought patterns. In readers, the DMN responds more strongly to fiction which centers on two specific kinds of content: vivid sensory descriptions, and deep social situations. Self-referential daydreams can also come in these categories; how often have you found yourself having an internal conversation with somebody you’re in conflict with, or imagined how it would feel to do something physically dangerous, to find out how things might go? When our mind wanders, especially when we’re under stress, it often runs these kinds of simulations to prepare us for perceived threats, both to our physical bodies, and to our emotional wellbeing. We can turn the ability to imagine these scenarios to our advantage, though. By infusing our writing with both vivid sensory descriptions and social content, we should be able to better engage both our own default mode networks, and those of our readers.
Second, we can avoid interruptions to the flow of our writing. The most common kind of interruption comes from judgement. The act of judging the quality of our work involves stepping out of the mental simulation, and could free up the DMN to return to its old ways. To avoid that, we can modify how we approach the process of writing. Writing fast is one approach; it forces you to focus your attention on the mental simulation of the story, rather than the words you use to record it. Keeping that simulation in a constant state of change, following a character through a continuously evolving scenario without pausing to plan your next step, could ensure that the DMN stays busy. Alternatively, you could look for other ways to prevent yourself from making judgements while you write. That might mean setting lower expectations for quality, or accepting the necessity of rewrites from the start.
Finally, there are ways to train your mind away from self-referential thoughts in the long term. There’s evidence that over time, meditation can rewire your DMN to be less active, even when we’re at rest.4 Writing more, I think, will also help. With practice, the techniques that at first require conscious attention will become more and more automatic. If you’re reading this, you’ve already experienced that process. When you were first learning to read, decoding strings of letters like the ones you see here took hard work, but now you do it without even trying. As the skills you use to express your ideas in words improve, more of your attention can be devoted to the ideas themselves, and you can learn to trust the quality of what you write without needing to double-check it as you go.
And I’m sure there are other techniques to reach the same state. There’s always more to learn. If you’re one of those rare individuals who can disappear into their writing at will, I’d love to hear how you do it, and how it feels. Or, if you find it especially difficult, I’d like to hear from you, too. Send me your anecdotes of flow and non-flow by email: my address is harry@harrysdesk.com
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Thanks for reading!
Sources Cited:
- DMN is associated with self-referential thoughts:
Menon, 20 years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis, Neuron (2023), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2023.04.023 ↩︎ - Flow is more common in activities with set rules and goals:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Chapter 4, specifically ↩︎ - Reading fiction enhances DMN activity, particularly social content and vivid description:
Diana I. Tamir, Andrew B. Bricker, David Dodell-Feder, Jason P. Mitchell, Reading fiction and reading minds: the role of simulation in the default network, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Volume 11, Issue 2, February 2016, Pages 215–224, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsv114 ↩︎ - Meditation produces lasting effects on DMN activity:
Garrison KA, Zeffiro TA, Scheinost D, Constable RT, Brewer JA. Meditation leads to reduced default mode network activity beyond an active task. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2015 Sep;15(3):712-20. doi: 10.3758/s13415-015-0358-3. PMID: 25904238; PMCID: PMC4529365. ↩︎
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