Writing in Flow: Keys to Enhanced Creativity

I read this book during a lull in my own writing flow, and realized that there are untapped principles and techniques that can help writers be more in tune, and thus more productive. It changed the way I looked at my creative process. I highly recommend the book as a renewable tool for motivation. Rereading parts of the book sparked new insights about the process. I look forward to seeing more from Ms. Perry.

As a writer, with articles published in OMNI, Success, Writer's Digest (cover article), and numerous other publications, it was a genuine pleasure and surprise to discover Dr. Perry's book on flow and writing. Finding descriptions of how so many well known writers enter and experience flow in their writing was both useful and inspiring. It really helped me get revved up for some new writing projects. Susan Perry has taken one of the most pleasant, challenging, and sometimes difficult to achieve aspects of the art of writing and woven together a discussion of the science and art.Flow is a thoroughly researched concept, with hundreds of studies illuminating this unique yet ubiquitous process. I've been aware of the research on it since the eighties. And Flow has played a major role in my own model of POsitive Psychology and Positivity, which I have lectured on at numerous national professional meetings. Reading the book, you'll understand this phenomenon and, more important, you'll get a handle on how to access or enter the flow state yourself, and use it to enhance your writing experience. Flow is not just another pop psych fad. It is an elegantly researched dimension of positive psychology. Some people write and some people criticize. I would venture to guess that critics who learned how to enter the flow state, might even become writers.

I have been sporadically hobby writing for about 30 years. This is the first time I am reading about "Flow" from others who really know how to describe it with an accuracy that makes tears come to my eyes. My wife thought that I finally lost it when I started yelling, "Yes, Yes that's it!" When I have read about flow in the past, it was always from one writer's personal perspective. This book took a different approach. The author was not primarily a creative writer and as such, did not intimately, routinely experience flow. She interviewed many types of writing professionals and described their experiences. At first, I was taken aback by the idea of having a person who was not intimate with flow, describe it. After much thought on the matter, and many chapters of this book later, I realized that it is much closer to the scientific method. It helped to not prejudice the outcome with a lot of preconceived notions. As such, the author accepted each of the writer's experiences, that she interviewed, as valid. This had the added benefit of not alienating the reader who had a different flow experience and widening the definition. This approach includes so many types of experiences that I am sure that there is one or more of which any creative person can identify with.Before reading this book, I had no idea that flow could be experienced in so many different ways as described by each of the writer's that were interviewed! I had only my personal perspective and I felt that it was the only way! I found myself entering flow while reading this book! I consciously tried to read it slow and suck out all of the content and absorb it. I was only able to read one chapter at a sitting before I had to run from the room and write something! Reading about flow in this book made me want experience it too badly to wait any longer than that!This is a one-of-a-kind type book on the creative writers experience. It includes everything a writer needs to know about and experience flow. I rate it A+ and it will remain a treasured reference volume on my bookshelf! Bob

I have never before read a book which explores the creative process with such clear, open, eyes. Susan Perry does a masterful job pulling together the nuggets of wisdom she gleaned from her interviews with top authors, seamlessly incorporating her own vast knowledge into the mix. This book offers a fascinating glimpse into the individual processes of different writers, but it also provides very practical tools for readers to find their own entry into the flow state. WRITING IN FLOW is, ultimately, a celebration of the juicy, timeless, creative pulse we all have the ability to tap.

Whatever your writing problem -- whether you're nerving yourself to start, kicking yourself for stopping, or simply praying for some control over a skill as mysterious and unstable as witchcraft -- there's something in here to get you into the creative state of "flow" that's the nirvana of all successful writers. What helps this book enormously (particularly the initial section, in which Dr. Perry helps you profile your own demons, blocks and tics to get an idea what kind of writer you are) is the vast cornucopia of quotes from, and direct interviews with, some of the world's most famous and accomplished authors -- who themselves seem to have overcome a startling variety of quirks, mindgames and outright derangements just to function. Do you obsess for months before managing to write a word? (Tom Wolfe takes years.) Or do you write lots only to fear -- or know -- that it's all useless garbage? (So does Michael Crichton.) And what about working hand to mouth, facing ridiculous deadlines, and the slings and arrows of outrageous critics and authority figures, real and imagined? (Join the club.) Fortunately, all the horror stories and clinical self-anatomization lead in a very straightforward way to customized programs of self-improvement and personal liberation that are precise, well-thought-out, and convincing (author Perry is a PhD social psychologist). It's also a charming touch that, while interviewing and analyzing all these bestseller and poet-laureate types, Perry also analyzes herself as a paradigmatic non-fiction author struggling with a vast and elusive subject -- and, in my opinion, nailing it.