I think I am not actually in flow the majority of the time I’m writing? Like, I get very rare periods where I lose track of time and suddenly it’s the end of the day and 10K words have appeared, and I get shorter snippets of forgetting-the-outside-world, but in the second-to-second timescale there’s often a feeling of effort and of deliberately staying on task. It just seems to be overall reinforcing enough that I will continue to block out time to do it and throw myself at getting through the hard parts, even if it’s been effortful and not felt rewarding in realtime for days or weeks. (I think this has happened more and more as I’ve gotten further into my fanfic, actually, because I’m writing situations that are harder to model.)
Probably another factor is that when I am sufficiently deep in writingmode, not writing is kind of painful and getting it off my mind enough to do other things is even more so.
I think I am not actually in flow the majority of the time I’m writing? Like, I get very rare periods where I lose track of time and suddenly it’s the end of the day and 10K words have appeared, and I get shorter snippets of forgetting-the-outside-world, but in the second-to-second timescale there’s often a feeling of effort and of deliberately staying on task. It just seems to be overall reinforcing enough that I will continue to block out time to do it and throw myself at getting through the hard parts, even if it’s been effortful and not felt rewarding in realtime for days or weeks. (I think this has happened more and more as I’ve gotten further into my fanfic, actually, because I’m writing situations that are harder to model.)
Probably another factor is that when I am sufficiently deep in writingmode, not writing is kind of painful and getting it off my mind enough to do other things is even more so.