I talk a lot about ‘flow state’ in my day to day. I’m a junkie for it. I crave those all-too-brief moments when I look up at the clock and am startled to realize that hours have gone by while I’ve been mercilessly typing away.
I remember one time when I’d been writing for so long that it got dark outside, and I hadn’t even noticed. I remember that I felt a vertigo so intense that I felt like I’d left my body and was hovering outside of my own skull, looking down at my hands on the keyboard. That was during a marathon session—the first time I’d ever attempted NaNoWriMo—it was closing in on the end of the month, and I barely had 20k, let alone 50k. Somehow I made it all the way up to 47k in the space of two nights.
I was so much younger then. I still have the end result of that project (a horrible pile of garbage called “MS.”) kicking around in a digital drawer, but it is very unlikely it will ever see the light of day. I still call it my “first novel,” though, despite the fact that I was only a few thousand words away from hitting that 50k finish line.
But I digress. “Flow state” is so important to me, as a writer. I have to be in a headspace where I am almost completely unaware that I am functioning as a corporeal organism. I have to achieve pure thought, be pure thought. I have to be operating completely in tune, on every level—my fingers must fly at the same rate as my thoughts do.
This is so rare lately. I find myself constantly seeking that bliss, tapping my empty veins for just a little kiss of it. Perhaps it’s that my situation has changed. I’m married now, and I work a part-time job, and I am often distracted from pure thought, from inspiration.
To that end, I have been attempting to discover what it is about writing that drew me to it in the first place. I have been trying to locate the joy of writing again. What makes it fun.
My husband is fond of saying “It’s called work for a reason. If it were fun, they’d call it something else.” I’ve been turning this over and over in my head since the first time he said it, but only recently have I realized that the [something else] is “play.” So I did some research on what “play” really means, and found some interesting things.
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that man is not meant to work. That we are not supposed to spend our hours slaving away at a job that does not satisfy us in order to reap financial gain. There must be something more to life than transaction.
As Johan Huizinga (Dutch philosopher, 1930s) details in his book Homo Ludens, “play” is a primary and necessary part of culture and society. I dug a little bit deeper this morning, though, looking for more on the topic, and discovered the work of Roger Callois (French philosopher, 1950s). Callois wrote a book called Man, Play and Games which breaks “play” down into four sub-sections:
Agon; or competition (example: tug-of-war)
Alea; or chance (example: gambling)
Mimesis (example: role-playing)
Ilinx; or vertigo (Gr. “whirlpool”) (example: dancing)
It was the last that really snagged my attention. I read further.
"[Games of ilinx] …are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.”
— Roger Callois; Men, Play and Games
Now this—this is what I want. I want to feel vertigo. I want to achieve this level of dynamism in my prose, if humanly possible.
So how do I allow ilinx into my writing?
I’m not sure, but I think it involves leaning harder into the intuitive side of craft, rather than the technical. It might be time to read Matt Cardin’s A Course in Demonic Creativity again (free ebook at the link, and trust me, it’s pretty awesome). It might be time to read more poetry.
Whatever it is, I’m excited to experiment and find out.