How to Find Childlike Wonder in Your Writing

Bliss, flow states, and the long road to self-discovery

Moments of pure joy are common for children but not for adults. When you’re a kid, everything seems strange and magical because you’re experiencing it for the first time. Recapturing that sense of mystery and enchantment is difficult for us as we become older and burdened with knowledge and responsibilities.

One of the few childlike, innocent joys I’ve had as an adult was writing a novel (called “God Decays”). I vividly remember the fun of planning out the scenes, of putting myself in the characters’ shoes, and of imagining in detail the events I was describing. These were heady, godlike thrills of creating and of ruling over a world.

Somewhere in that joy, I suspect, was a secret of how to write well.

The Business and the Art of Writing

I’ve been writing articles regularly since 2011 when I started uploading them to a blog. I’ve collected the articles in several massive anthologies. Mind you, that’s not to say I’ve figured out how to succeed as a professional writer. Earning a living as a writer and knowing how to produce quality prose are vastly different skills.

You might assume that if you can do the latter, the market will take care of the former. But that would be so only if a weakly regulated market were meritocratic, which it isn’t in many areas of life, including art. Just compare the most popular movies that earn the most money, with the movies that critics and film experts award the highest praises. Seldom do the two groups of movies intersect.

Indeed, I expect that mastering the business side of writing can drain you of creative inspiration, especially in the digital age in which you’re competing with all manner of amateur fluff, spam, and clickbait. This would be especially onerous if you were like me and what you feel driven to write were as abrasive and unpopular as a host of philosophical criticisms of everything under the sun that falls short of the ideal.

Perhaps, then, you’re wondering how I’ve kept up writing for ten years, writing over 200 philosophical articles since I switched to a popular platform in late 2019. How did I keep improving my craft, eschewing at every turn the perpetration of hackery, never feeling overly discouraged, never betraying my muse, and even gaining some financial success as a writer, considering those unfavourable conditions?

This is what I know something about — not how to game the internet and make a living as an author, but how to fulfill your creative potential as a writer. The secret is deceptively simple: write about what provokes you.

I repeat that this is not the principle of professional authors who are obliged to write about whatever’s the easiest to sell. Writers who care most about making money are like hired guns who must be ready to shoot anyone at a moment’s notice; these writers leave aside their personal opinions and follow the trends. Typically, those trends descend to the lowest common denominator. Writing in that way is business, not art.

Following Your Bliss

But if you want to produce brainchildren you can be proud of, which will inspire you to improve your skills over the long run, keeping you enthusiastic and eager to explore one subject after the next until you might even overtake the range of those hired-gun writers — if that’s your overriding goal as a writer, you should ponder that Jungian adage made popular by Joseph Campbell, to follow your bliss.

Again, the reason this is easier said than done is because as adults we lose touch not just with joy but with all extreme emotions. Society tames us so we’ll fit in as civilized members. In any case, bliss isn’t the same as joy; rather, the bliss I have in mind is a sense of the sublime, of the awesome magnitude of the existential mystery that’s beyond our parochial evaluations.

What this means, in practice, is that we should begin our adventure in writing by caring enough about writing to write a lot and to constantly edit our use of language, looking for ways of improving every word and turn of phrase, with dictionary and thesaurus in hand.

Mastering the Mechanics of Writing

The first time I started writing outside the classroom was as an undergraduate student. I kept a black notebook with me and wrote philosophical articles in my spare time. But I noticed how my writing differed from the famous philosophy texts I was reading in class. My writing wasn’t as smooth, I wasn’t using the best words, and my sentences were clumsy. So I struggled with improving the sentences by crossing out words and clauses and adding new ones on the page, circling the replacements and inserting them with looping arrows until the pages looked more like electrical wiring diagrams than texts.

Once, in an early graduate school class, we had to write a page summarizing where we planned to go with our Master of Arts thesis, and we had to hand that typed page to another student in the class for comments. I duly covered the other student’s page with the kind of marks I was used to making on my work. In short, I could see a hundred ways of improving her writing. When I handed her back the page, someone else saw it and said, as if in shock, “He massacred it.”

But it was all in the name of the ideal. I’d already put myself through that labor so I wouldn’t have to suffer the embarrassment at another editor’s hands. In between classes I’d already massacred countless crops of my brainchildren, sending them shrieking to their graves, using the soil enriched by their corpses to nourish the next generations of my prose.

Of course, that’s only the preliminary stage, the mastering of the mechanics of writing. We need never stop improving even in that respect, but at some point, after you’ve written perhaps thousands of pages and strived to perfect your sentence structures and vocabulary, even your first drafts will be presentable as finished works to most audiences. Here and there you’ll have some typos to correct and sentences to polish, but you’ll have internalized the mechanics and heuristics so that you’ll think in well-formed sentences and paragraphs.

At that point you’ll be something like the child chess prodigy in that scene in “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” in which the student’s teacher knocks over the chess pieces in the middle of a match, challenging the student to recall the positions and to play on without the physical crutches of seeing and of moving the pieces. You’ll be able to write in your mind, when you’re walking down the street, showering, or lying in bed. You’ll have developed your inner voice and shaken hands with your muse or daemon.

Once you’ve climbed that summit, you’ll be confronted with the next one, with the question of content: Now that you can write, what should you write about?

Emotional Intensity as a Gateway to the Flow State

You’ll need to invest your enthusiasm in some subject besides the act of writing, studying that subject in depth until you understand why you care so much about it. Some writers skip this step of feeding their mind with information, of gulping from the ocean of content that’s already been produced. They prefer to write solely about themselves as though they were in therapy or were keeping a public journal. Indeed, that’s what blogs were originally for, and we presume we’re already familiar with ourselves, so this might seem like a viable shortcut to finding your subject.

But this kind of confessional writing is self-indulgent and self-defeating, especially if you’re making your output public. Why would strangers want to know all about you? More importantly, why would you want to share so much about yourself with the worldwide web? Even more importantly, why waste time pretending your life’s story is worthy of everyone’s attention, when you could be enriching yourself the way you improved your writing skills, by delving deep into some other area of interest.

Use your sense of bliss like a dowsing rod and learn all about something that fascinates you. And stop being so self-absorbed.

The more you learn about some worthy subject, the more you might discover you’ve barely known yourself. By learning about science, business, technology, history, politics, philosophy, religion, or art, you’ll begin to piece together what you’ve really been all along. You’ll start to see how you fit into that sublime state of universal being, and you’ll have whetted your appetite as an intellectual, as someone who cares about ideas.

When you’ve transitioned from flattering your ego to investigating the deeper meaning of things, you’ll have strapped yourself to the back of a tiger and won’t be at a loss for subject matter. If anything, you may eventually cover so much ground in your writing that you’ll be in danger of having only to repeat yourself.

Still, you’ll want to prioritize subjects that provoke your emotional reactions. If you find that you’re ranting to yourself about some article you just read, turn that authentic reaction into your next article. If some experience causes you to burst out laughing, figure out why you found it funny and use that knowledge in your next piece.

Let your emotions and attitudes guide you here, since they’re gateways to the coveted flow state. When you’re in the groove your mind is operating at peak efficiency; time passes despite what you’re doing because you’re in the zone, occupied by the depth of the present moment. You’ll be moving swiftly and organically from one thought or paragraph to the next. You’ll already know what to say next because you’ll have some ability to translate your emotional reaction to the topic into arguments, explanations, or metaphors.

If you know enough about something, you’ll likely care a lot about it, and if you care about it, you’ll have strong feelings about it. Those feelings will carry you through the process of writing up your thoughts in some format. You won’t get bored or discouraged, time will fly, and you’ll be improving your skills with each page that pours from your mind.

The Wonder of Art’s Omnipresence

This is the sense in which learning to write well can be therapeutic. By studying the workings of something besides yourself, you come to appreciate it more until you catch a hint of the sacred bliss hiding within all enlightened perceptions. You start to see your truer self as that which relates to this other terrain you’ve started to uncover.

But learning to write well teaches us also why we should keep writing regardless of whether we’re as successful a writer as we’d like to be, or whether the environment for artists of all stripes has been polluted by extraneous, degrading business concerns. Once we’ve learned to write well, we have all we need to answer this unsettling question: Even if we have an audience, why should we keep writing, knowing that eventually every line we’ve ever typed or penned will be forgotten as our writings pass into obscurity?

My answer is that I keep writing to retain a sense of childlike wonder.

When I was a kid, our basement was unfinished, and my parents kept a variety of knickknacks, old furniture, and junk in storage down there, arrayed along the sides of the walls, leaving enough space indoors for a carefree child to ride around and around on a bicycle, past the boxes, lamps, and other seeming treasures. That’s what I did, and it was innocent fun building up speed on the bike and imagining what I’d find if I opened one of the forbidden boxes.

Having written thousands of pages that hang together in a worldview I’ve evoked and explored, writing for me approximates those carefree thrills or the fun of imagining the characters’ actions from my novel. After all, both fiction and nonfiction are creative endeavours. If you’re writing out your thoughts as arguments and explanations, you’re still creating a model of reality, albeit one informed more by reason than by free-flowing imagination. But the creative joys of generating the brainchildren are comparable.

Even if you’re pondering grim topics in your editorials, when you’ve written enough of them, you may start to see your worldview as little more than an elaborate work of art. From there, you may even appreciate the aesthetic status of everything whatsoever as a product of natural or human creativity. Perhaps the bliss that keeps us going so enthusiastically in our hobbies is that godlike freedom of ranging over a created world with mastery and with an artistic appreciation of the contingency that makes the contents so bittersweet.