Flow vs Grind
No, this is not a comparison of dating sites, but rather a reflection on recent writing experience. I’ve published my second novel (I know, why haven’t mentioned this before?), and the writing of that came pretty easily. The characters led the plot and it flowed fairly quickly, in comparison with my first novel. I’ve almost finished my third novel, and that was also in the category of “flow”.
While I’m still doing copy-editing on the third novel, but I’ve been getting the fourth one underway. While I have a basic idea for the outline of the novel, getting the voice of the main protagonist right has been firmly in the grind category. I’ve reworked different versions of it, changed the tense, gender and perspective. I was in a rut thinking that maybe this one wasn’t going to transform from vague idea to actual novel.
But over the summer I kept going, reworking it. It finally got to a decent stage, although I’d spent so long on it, I wasn’t sure anymore. Having shared it with Maren and a local writer’s group, I’ve come to appreciate it’s one of my most successful chapters.
The point, I guess, is that you have to be willing to embrace both of these modes. Even in a book that arises from flow, there’s a lot of grind – reworking chapters, copy-editing, finessing elements, and so on. While I was considering this, I appreciated that although I feel it most obviously with a creative pursuit such as writing, you can see versions of it throughout life. Much of work can be viewed as a mix of grind and flow. If you’re lucky then it’s not all grind, and there is a good portion of creative flow. But even then, you have to accept the role of grind. It may seem that flow is preferable, and I certainly enjoy being “in the zone” but we shouldn’t dismiss grind as not being creative. It’s just a different form of creativity, with smaller gains, more effort required, but it may well be that the results are more robust.
(Image – https://www.flickr.com/photos/50357632@N00/4317917727/)
