Dr. Susan K. Perry

Dr. Susan K. Perry, Ph.D agreed to be interviewed via e-mail by Jillian Leslie.

JL: "Flow" sounds enigmatic. Is it indeed a mystery or an innate process available to all writers?

SP: No matter how practical-minded you are, the experience of flow has some very weird elements indeed. In short, flow is the psychological process you enter when you're so deeply absorbed in what you're doing that time seems to stop, you forget yourself and your surroundings, and you want to keep on doing whatever it is you're doing, no matter what happens to it later. It is absolutely available to all writers, and in fact, to everyone, everywhere, who is doing almost anything that is deeply engaging. I studied top novelists and poets because they're so wonderful at expressing their flow experiences. It's marvelous to hear Sue Grafton, Jane Smiley, Robert Olen Butler, Mark Strand, Jonathan Kellerman, and dozens more, talk candidly about flow.

JL: How will writers benefit from reading your book?

SP: If you're a writer, learning how to enter flow may be the single most important thing you can do to help ensure longterm success. As writers, we mostly need to motivate ourselves to produce. When you're in flow, you tend to produce some of your best work, and most importantly, you're not struggling but working with your deepest sources of creativity. Thus, you enjoy yourself more, write more often, and increase the odds of coming up with original and good work. My book offers a multitude of ways to enter flow, no matter who you are or how you work best. You'll learn how the most successful novelists and poets do what they do on a daily basis, and how you can do the very same thing (at least it will feel the same--no one can guarantee the same results!).

JL: Wouldn't skeptics suggest that flow might be a nice bonus, but when we have writing to do, we should apply rear to chair and do the job, flow or not?

SP: Why do you write? Is writing, to you, the same as a factory job, one you do only because you have to pay the bills? Or do you write because it's deeply meaningful to you and sometimes highly gratifying, among other reasons? Flow is a bonus, yes, but it's a bonus you can learn to enjoy much more often. It's more than simply enjoying what you do. Flow allows you to be your most creative. Yes, you have to apply rear to chair in some kind of regular fashion, or flow won't find you very easily. It's the difference between doing a job and pursuing a passion. Those of us who manage to do both at the same time, as often as possible, are very lucky, very happy, and probably worked hard to get here. I know I did!

JL: Does a person's formal education or IQ influence the ability to achieve flow?

SP: Not in the least. It's been found that some rather uneducated and/or simple folks can flow just as readily. In fact, sometimes you have to put all that education aside just for a little while and surrender to flow. You can't push creativity around and tell it how smart you are. Let's compare the ability to write in flow to other psychological processes, such as the ability to love unstintingly. Smart, educated people can do either, or mess up on either, but so can anyone.

JL: What about young writers? Do you think adolescent writers experience flow in the same way as adults?

SP: Actually, I think the process is just about the same, regardless of age. Little kids have less to get in the way, but by the time we reach our later teen years, life and certain English teachers have found ways to distract and mislead us away from getting deeply focused on creative writing. Combatting that, and combatting the fear that we're not good enough, is the same for all of us.

JL: Why does flow seem to come naturally to some writers, but others constantly have to battle internal distractions? Are writers drawn into distraction because, subconsciously, they want to be distracted? How can a distracted writer establish flow?

SP: There's always one question in every interview that makes me take a deep breath. This is one of those. Some writers do seem to be naturals at entering flow. They tell me that if it weren't for daily responsibilities, they'd be in flow all the time. From childhood on, some of them say, they've always been imaginative, daydreamy, easily and intently focused on whatever they're doing.

The rest of us are much more distractible. I'm highly distractible, which is one of the main reasons I wanted to learn how to enter flow. Do we want to be distracted? Probably there are times when the answer is yes. Here's why, and see if this fits you. When we take on more than we can possibly manage to complete, saying yes to too many activities, there's a certain kick involved. It's highly stimulating to multi-task, as our culture keeps telling us we should be doing. Do this, do that, check this off the list, plan that. There's an adrenaline rush when you manage to keep all the balls in the air at once.

Personally, I hate to eliminate any of the wonderful possibilities out there, for fun or for career-building. But to enter flow and allow myself to slip down into the heart of my creative self takes a certain willingness to shut out everything else for a while. What it takes is some serious reflecting on what your priorities are. It's that simple. What do you want to have accomplished before this short, unpredictable life is over? Once you figure this out, you might do as I'm doing: methodically finish up as many loose ends as possible, practice saying no to tasks that aren't really contributing to those longer term goals, and gradually move toward a more serene life in which writing what you want to write becomes a daily possibility. I talk about this a bit in Writing in Flow. Learning to enter flow isn't only a matter of rituals and routines, though they're important. It's also a matter, for the distractible, of re-evaluating your life.

JL: Do people who practice yoga or meditation find it easier to get into a flow state than people who have never disciplined their minds to focus?

SP: I have never done meditation or yoga. Some of those writers I interviewed do one or the other or both. There are many roads to the looseness necessary for entering flow. Focus may or may not be a matter of discipline. I personally don't like the thought of discipline. To me, it implies doing something you don't want to do. I'd rather attack the problem of focus--and it is a problem--by finding out how I can either learn to love what I'm doing, or learn to do what it is I love. When you're doing what you deep down want to do, discipline is beside the point.

JL: Does personality type have anything to do with flow? Does a calm person stand a better chance of experiencing flow than a hyper person?

SP: I found that a person's experience of flow is as individual as each personality is. We're all so different in the way we respond. Too hyper won't work--it's a highly distractible state. But not every great writer is calm! It's a matter of finding the right balance for you between relaxation and excitement.

JL: Does flow come as easily to left-brained people as it does to right-brained people? Do technical writers, for example, experience flow in the same way as fiction writers?

SP: Even mathematicians and physicists and engineers experience flow. But whether it's the exact same experience for technical writers and for poets, who can ever say? That's about as impossible to gauge (at this stage of our knowledge of brains) as to determine whether your ‘green' is the exact same as my ‘green.' And I don't like to think of people as left-brained or right-brained. Current research has sort of blown that dichotomy to pieces. I like to say we use an ‘omnimax' of our minds when we're in flow and being creative. Right, left, upper, lower, deeper, heart, soul, psyche--everything we've got comes into play.

Different people do experience flow differently, however. Some never get into it deeply, which is fine. For some, it's an on-and-off thing. That's me, and I've learned to accept that. So I no longer worry so much about my distractibility, the fact that I like the phone to ring and that I like to keep my door open in case something interesting develops outside my study. What I do to counteract those tendencies to be pulled away from my writing, is to keep coming back to it again and again. Eventually, I get a lot done.

JL: How have you applied the knowledge you garnered from writing this book into your own writing?

SP: Ironically, when you're promoting a bestselling book, flow is only a distant dream. I get into flow while I talk about or teach flow, but have so little time for my writing. What I've learned, though, is that novelists have more fun than I've often had, and now I know exactly why. I need to be more playful in my writing, whether I do eventually write fiction or in my next nonfiction book. I've learned to loosen up much more. I've learned that when I write what I believe in, flow is a possibility, but when I write just for money, it's not going to happen.

JL: How has writing this book enriched your life?

SP: Flow has become a lens through which I see everything. Look around you: how many people do you see who are truly enjoying their lives, who are in flow a lot of the time? And how many are just marking time, waiting for . . . what?

 About the Author

Relevant Links:

Loving in Flow Interview

• Author's Web site
• Order Loving in Flow at Amazon.com
• Order Writing in Flow at Amazon.com
• Classes at Writers Online Workshops; Instructor's Page