White Flow from Natalie Goldberg

The Zen approach to writing dominates Natalie Goldberg's book Writing Down the Bones. Every third page turns up a worthy quote. Here's an excerpt:

Often I can look around the room at my students as they write and can tell which ones are really on and present at a given time in their writing. They are more intensely involved and their bodies are hanging loose. Again, it is like running. There's little resistance when the run is good. All of you is moving; there's no you separate from the runner. In writing, when you are truly on, there's no writer, no paper, no pen, no thoughts. Only writing does writing- everything else is gone.

White Flow from Jack Remick

The first White Flow State quote comes from From Jack Remick over at the Weekend Novelist

We jot start lines on slips of paper and toss them into a hat. Someone picks a start line. "I remember that day." Bob starts the timer. I write for ten minutes. Furious. All those people. Then something happens. I forget about the people and the clock and I forget about where I am and who brought me there-I'm into the words and the scratch of my pen on the paper. The feel of the pen on the paper. Something happens. Don't know what happens until I read aloud, in short, sharp bursts. The words are hot and electric. A new energy rips through me as I expose my fresh new unedited uncerebral loose awful words to the group. If I go to a Jungian psychologist, he'll tell me I'm having an abreaction-a break through of emotional energy when the unconscious pours material through the corpus callosum, bringing image and power and excitement and-truth.

In The White Flow

There is a moment when the universe aligns, and the words flow from your fingertips like a river of molten honey, spicy and golden and roaring out to possess the vacant pages.

You can't control it, you can't change it - there isn't even a desire to. You are merely the channel through which it flows, and you experience the thunder and the joy and the pain as something unique emerges from you.

This is the flow state. This is the white moment.

You are the prophet of God, the mount of a loa, the voice of a universe. Zeus thrusts lightning through your brain, thunder in your ears. And the moment leads on and on, building and flowing and piling word upon word, paragraph upon paragraph, scene upon scene, characters dancing and loving and bleeding on the page in the golden light.

This blog is dedicated to that creative state.

Send 50-200 word descriptions of your flow state to flow (dot) state (at) fontaigne (dot) com.

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