Cat Rambo is a wonderful writer and teacher. I reviewed her space opera, You Sexy Thing, here. She runs the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers live and on-demand classes. And she's a nifty person. Best of all, I love the way she talks about the writing process. Here, in an article on multitasking from the SFWA blog, she nails the description of the mental state when everything comes together and the world flow like silken fire. Whenever I see a depiction of a blocked writer (last night I watched the "Calliope" episode of the Netflix "The Sandman" series), I cringe. Yes, we go through fallow periods, frustration, and emptiness. But most working writers find strategies to get around, over, or through those blocks because there's nothing like a writer's high.
Here's Cat's description:
You start putting words on the page, and if you’re lucky, you hit the flow, that happy stream of words where you are writing and simultaneously entertaining yourself, discovering what happens next, where the world falls away and all you are doing and thinking about is writing. A state of intense, focused concentration that feels wonderful, because you are simultaneously challenged and exercising competency, constantly rising to that challenge and succeeding. [bold mine]
That’s one of the happiest states for a writer, and one that we chase. And if we want to hit it, we need to get rid of distractions. Multitasking is such a distraction, taking up a little bit of bandwidth in order to keep tabs on that task or other tasks and tracking time. Multitasking is not compatible with things that require concentration and time.
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