The Prairie Wind

The Journey to “Flow”

By Carol Coven Grannick

I usually know when I’m on the wrong track with something. For me, “The Wrong Track” (TWT) has a few recognizable characteristics:

• I can’t do what I am trying to do, or any progress feels like pulling teeth.
• My heart and stomach are twisting into one another, one (stomach) disinterested in sustenance, and the other (heart) crying for help.
• I can’t make a decision about whether to do it or not, and the debate is in negative language (more about this soon).
• I watch the minutes tick by because I’m getting absolutely nothing done.

Being on TWT can happen for many different reasons.

It might have something to do with the subject I’m writing about, the way I’m writing, the place I’m writing in, or the process of the story itself.

Or it could be a project I think I should do because I know I’m capable of it, but my heart’s not in it.

TWT is a drag. Maybe you call it Writer’s Block (I don’t, but that’s another column).

In addition, when I’m “back and forth” about something in this way, it feels old and familiar. I grew up learning not to trust my own heart and mind, so I had to learn how as a young adult.

I’ll always be vulnerable to that mistrust, though, which is why Learned Optimism has been so important to me. The negativity of mistrusting yourself closes your brain to options, problem solving, and creativity.

In other words, when you’re in an argument with yourself (for me, part of that argument is the stomach-heart fight I noted above), your brain closes itself off to a solution. And that’s what happened to me. What did I really want? What should I do? How could I tell what I really wanted? If I began, could I finish? Would I end up in a kind of world full of social media and blogging that would feel unfamiliar? Would I still have time to write my children’s fiction?

The Irrepressible Writer blog and book proposal was such a project for me. I knew I loved writing my columns for The Prairie Wind, doing workshops, and working with individual writers to build and maintain resilience. But as more than a handful of writers suggested an Irrepressible Writer book proposal, I had to think seriously about it.

Did I want to write a book? I wasn’t sure. I knew from keeping up with the writing business that I’d need a platform. That meant connecting with social media, which I hadn’t done and wasn’t sure I wanted to do. And it meant a blog: writing about the applications of Positive Psychology for writers and the writing life much more frequently than my Prairie Wind columns. How on earth would I think of topics for an endless number of blog posts?

Yikes! Words and phrases like can’t, don’t have enough ideas, and won’t be able to work on my fiction kept popping up. And look at the language in the previous paragraph. It was Pessimistic Explanatory Style 101 (http://theirrepressiblewriter.com/2009/11/13/youve-got-style-which-one-will-it-be/).

So back to TWT: I’d start the proposal, then stop, work on the proposal, get distracted.

I talked with my writing partners and my online “weekly accountability” group. All of them without exception affirmed one of my basic beliefs: give yourself permission not to do what you feel pressured to do, then decide. In an emotional environment of “abundance,” one in which more than a couple choices truly exist, you’re freer to choose what you really want.

And that’s exactly what happened. One of my writing partners put it this way: “Just because we are good at something, just because there’s something we’re even better at than our fiction writing, doesn’t mean that we want to do it. But that said, you need to ask yourself whether you want to pass up this possible opportunity, especially since you do enjoy that work, too.”

I did think about it. I gave myself permission not to pursue The Irrepressible Writer further than my Prairie Wind columns. As I did, I changed my “explanatory style” from pessimistic to optimistic. I wondered what might happen if I opened myself up to learning about social media, developing a blog, and writing a book proposal.

This curiosity opened my heart and mind. I could feel it. You can, too, can’t you? When Carmela Martino posted on our SCBWI-Illinois listserv about four free webinars Greg Pincus and Mark Blevis were offering to writers, I signed up. Wow! My first webinars! I learned. And as I learned, I became more excited, more curious, and even more open. I found a website with a design I loved and checked for the designer. He was available and affordable, and I committed to developing a blog that we worked on together for a month, and about whose technology I’m still learning. In the meantime, I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote, a nonfiction book proposal for The Irrepressible Writer.

The most amazing lesson I learned once again, and hope to convey to you, is that it was only when I changed how I was thinking about the whole issue that my brain opened itself to possibilities and my own capacities. It works every time. Positivity “broadens and builds” (http://positivityratio.com).

The Wrong Track was gone. The Right Track was here. How did I know? Not only did I start having fun (and, by the way, continue working on my middle-grade novel, albeit more slowly right now), but when I worked on the proposal and wrote blog posts and even worked on the technology of the blog, and when I wrote this column, I lost track of time.

Have you had that feeling? Maybe you get it a lot, or maybe just a little bit. Maybe never—but you can journey there. It’s called flow, a concept identified by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It’s a core component of the Positive Psychology movement and applicable to all of our lives. You can read about flow (eudaemonia) as a component of a meaningful life here: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/seligman04/seligman_index.html.

When I experience flow, it’s a decision maker, an absolute indicator that I am in the right place, doing the right thing at the right time.

And with that feeling in mind, I welcome you, with deep pleasure, to http://theirrepressiblewriter.com, a blog devoted to helping writers build and maintain resilience for our writing…and our lives.

Carol Coven Grannick is a children’s writer and writer’s therapist. Her picture book manuscripts have won awards for unpublished writing. Her blog is at http://theirrepressiblewriter.com.

Surprises for Hard Times

By Carol Coven Grannick

Sometimes no matter how hard you work at staying resilient, you hit a patch of space and time that overwhelms. You use every ounce of energy you can muster to keep yourself from heading into a downward spiral.

The negativity pulls you down, but you want to stay afloat with your writing life, believing that your commitment and consistent effort will lead to your dreams coming true.

But the realities of the business and the current financial climate frighten you and threaten to drag you down. You see a question on a writing listserv: “Is it fair that more and more agents and editors are saying you can only submit as a conference attendee, which eliminates all people who cannot afford to spend money for conferences?” You think, yes, that’s me. Is it fair? And more: Is it right? (more…)

Make Positivity Happen–It’s More Than a Good Idea

By Carol Coven Grannick

When I was in high school, I wrote a weekly column for the newspaper that examined a negative attitude or situation from a positive perspective. But in the years between high school and the early 1990s, when I discovered learned optimism and positive psychology, I scorned those columns as “fake positive thinking”—a teenager’s desperate attempts to believe in joy and survive the pains of growing up in a less than supportive environment. I had no idea these were early attempts at “disputing” my own pessimism. Now I see them as one of my first, albeit unaware, steps toward discovering that the simple act of talking to oneself differently can make a life-changing difference, if the new thoughts are heartfelt and not just wispy affirmations or smiley faces. (more…)

New Year’s Resolutions, Optimistically

By Carol Coven Grannick

Go ahead and figure out your New Year’s resolutions, but here are a few tips to optimize your success. (more…)

Permission to Dream, Not Dread

By Carol Coven Grannick

Above my desk is an old print I purchased in London in 1976, in a gift shop near Charles Dickens’ office. It is a half-finished painting of Dickens in his office, which I’d just seen. The unfinished portion is pen-and-ink sketches of many of Dickens’ characters filling up the space from ceiling to floor, inhabiting the dreams of the writer, who is in his chair, pushed back from the desk, asleep. (more…)

Finding Your Center of Gratitude

By Carol Coven Grannick

In Martin Seligman’s groundbreaking work on optimism, Learned Optimism, the psychologist discusses the technique of disputation, the deliberate effort to change the way we talk to ourselves about internal and external events. Optimists and pessimists have very different ways of framing their self-talk about successful events as well as disappointments and failures. (more…)

Self-Sabotage: If You Don’t Hear The Tree Fall, Is It Even In The Forest?

By Carol Coven Grannick

“I think I’m unconsciously sabotaging myself.”

Have you ever said that to yourself at times when you seem to get in your own way? When a goal or dream is so clear in your mind, and yet your behavior seems to go in the opposite direction?  (more…)

A Learned Optimist’s Revised Version of Writers Block

By Carol Coven Grannick

Writers write. . . how often do we hear or see that statement? And it’s true, of course. But it’s also true that writers. . . well, don’t write. . . sometimes, at least. (more…)

To Be or Not to Be . . . Whoever I Am (That is the Answer)

By Carol Coven Grannick

We get stuck. We reach for advice – a writing friend, a craft book or article, a workshop. We try to implement the advice. If it works, we get unstuck. If it doesn’t, we may say to ourselves, “What’s wrong with me?” And things can spiral downward from there. . . But if you’ve read Carmela Martino’s Writing Tips column in this issue, you’ll understand the complexity of trying to find One Right Answer.

What a delicate balance it is between needing and taking the advice of other writers through books, articles or critiques, and holding on to the unique “self” we bring to our own writing and process.

Who’s to say why some advice works for some people and other advice does not? (more…)

How to ‘Do’ Optimism, Part II: The Skill and Hard Work of Disputing

By Carol Coven Grannick

Two things I hear myself say a lot: changing yourself in a profound and permanent way can feel unnatural, fraudulent or strange, and is often saturated with feelings of loss and sadness for the familiarity you’re leaving behind; and the process of change is erratic and requires tremendous compassion and patience. (more…)