There’s a moment in any writing session when I notice myself checking the word count. It’s a small movement, barely noticeable, but it changes everything. Before I was writing. Now I am counting. And in that shift from absorption to evaluation, something quietly collapses.

I wonder if this is what happens for every writer. You sit down to work on a difficult passage, to sit with a memory that won’t quite come clear, and then something in you reaches for a measure. How many words did I write today. How does this compare to yesterday. Is this going well.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi spent his career studying what makes people happy, and his findings keep circling back to a paradox that writers know intimately but rarely name. Happiness, he concluded, is not something that happens to us. It is not good fortune or random chance. It is something we can cultivate by taking control of our inner experiences.¹Csíkszentmihályi, M., PositivePsychology.com. The Father of Flow. https://positivepsychology.com/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-father-of-flow/ But the very act of trying to cultivate it, of measuring whether we have achieved it, seems to destroy it.

Flow is the state writers yearn for. Those moments when the words come without effort, when the passage you have been struggling with suddenly resolves itself, when you look up and an hour has passed like ten minutes. Csíkszentmihályi described flow as moments when our consciousness intensifies, our self-consciousness disappears, and we perform at our best. It sounds almost spiritual when he describes it. And yet we have taken this beautiful, elusive state and turned it into a productivity metric.

We talk about flow as though it is a technique. How to get into flow. How to optimise for flow. How to schedule flow. The language of efficiency applied to the opposite of efficiency.

Graham Wallas described the creative process in 1926 as four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.²Wallas, G., 1926. The Art of Thought. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/creative-process What strikes me about this model is the second stage. Incubation. The unconscious processing that happens when you step away from the problem. When you stop working on it entirely and do something else, or sleep, or simply wait.

This is the stage that productivity culture cannot tolerate. Incubation looks like doing nothing. It looks like procrastination. It looks like wasting time. But the research is clear: the creative process requires it. The mind continues working on a problem even when you have consciously given up. The aha moment arrives not while you are straining toward it but while you are looking at something else entirely.

For memoir writers, this has particular resonance. You cannot force a memory to emerge. You cannot optimise your way to emotional truth. The harder you push to feel something specific, the more likely you are to produce a flattened version of what you actually felt. A passage that sits for weeks, that you return to with fresh eyes, often becomes the strongest in the piece. Not because of the initial effort but because of the letting it alone.

This is the paradox many writers report. When stuck on a passage, the instinct is to push harder. To force the memory to cooperate. To sit at the screen until something changes. But the solutions that arrive often come not while sitting at the screen but while walking, or reading something unrelated, or thinking about something entirely different. The solution arrives unbidden, carrying its own authority.

Csíkszentmihályi was shaped by his experiences during World War II. He witnessed suffering that convinced him happiness was not the absence of difficulty but the presence of absorption. This feels relevant to memoir writers. The losses we write about did not disappear because we wrote about them. But the act of absorption in the writing can create a kind of flow that is its own reward, independent of publication or recognition.

The question then becomes: what are we actually trying to optimise for. If the goal is to produce more words, then flow is the wrong framework entirely. Flow is not about output. It is about presence. It is about the quality of experience while you are working, not the quantity of work you produce.

I wonder if this is why so many writers feel guilty. They measure their productivity and find themselves wanting, not because they are failing but because they are measuring the wrong thing. They are counting words when they should be noticing whether they are present. They are comparing their output to others when they should be asking whether this particular session left them feeling more alive.

The memoirist’s relationship to productivity is complicated. We are writing about real events, events that often involved loss or trauma or difficulty. There is an urgency to the work. People die. Memories fade. The window for capturing certain experiences is not infinite. This urgency can be generative, pushing us to do the work while the material is still fresh. But it can also be destructive, turning the writing into another task on a list, another item to optimise.

WhatCsíkszentmihályi seemed to understand is that happiness comes from control over inner experience, not from external success. For memoir writers, this might mean that the goal is not to produce a book but to engage deeply with the process of remembering. The book may or may not come. The absorption is available now.

There’s a quiet radicalism in this. It says no to the metrics. It says no to the comparison. It says that showing up and being present is enough, even if no words are written. Especially if no words are written. Because sometimes the most important work happens in the incubation, in the stepping away, in the trust that the unconscious mind is still labouring even when you have turned your attention elsewhere.

The next time you sit down to write and feel the pull toward counting, toward measuring, toward asking whether this session was productive, consider that you might be looking in the wrong direction. The question is not how much did I produce. The question is whether I was there. Whether I was present with the memory, with the words, with the difficult work of reconstruction. Whether I allowed myself to be absorbed rather than efficient.

That’s not a technique. It’s a reorientation. And it might be the only thing that saves us from the productivity trap.

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  Csíkszentmihályi, M., PositivePsychology.com. The Father of Flow. https://positivepsychology.com/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-father-of-flow/
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  Wallas, G., 1926. The Art of Thought. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/creative-process