The Writing Zone

In his excellent novel Bag of Bones (which I just recently read), Stephen King made frequent mention of something called "The Zone". No, he wasn't referring to the diet plan that balances fat, protein, and carbohydrate consumption. King's "Zone" was a mental state that a writer would get into that greatly enhanced his writing ability. Being in the Zone is something akin to being in a trance, where outside distractions simply do not intrude upon the writer's thoughts, enabling him to experience a world of his own creation and draw his writing cues from that world. I happen to know for a fact that this "Zone" is a reality for me. There are times when I can barely put one word ahead of another. And then something will happen and I am completely immersed in my writing, with whatever going on around me seemingly inconsequential and even unreal. With such experiences, I often find that after snapping out of my "Zone", I've written quite a bit of material. And often, when I read back through what I've written, I feel disturbed at the content, which is usually quite a bit more outspoken and blunt than how I would normally express myself. Often, I will write a blog article this way and then delay publishing for a few days because of my discomfort with it. Right now, I have a couple of articles like this and am asking myself how appropriate they are to put out on my blog. But I think that this is a good thing, because it means that I am beginning to write out on "the edge". And the edge is where all writers want to stay, both to attract readership and to be honest about both their feelings and writing.

I can see right now that one of my greatest obstacles to becoming a prolific writer is that I can only slip into the Zone under certain conditions. Usually, these conditions don't exist at home, so I often go out to a coffee shop somewhere, where often I can get myself into the required state. But in order to write anything substantial, I need to train myself to reach that "Zone" state at home somehow, and to elicit the needed cooperation in this endeavor from my family. My major role model for prolific writing has to be the late great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who was basically in the Zone all of the time, even when he wasn't physically writing things down! Asimov is credited with having written 500 books, but I'll be happy with a small fraction of that!