Yes writing is a waste of time.

The Think Buddha blog features a charming essay on the necessity of time wasting to creative life by Tory Syracuse (it’s a three year old essay but, self-evidently, time wasting is a timeless subject) and it has some interesting things to say about the flow state of writing.

One of the great gifts of writing—and, though I don’t have much experience in other areas, I imagine this is true of most forms of art-making—is that it is not a linear process. Too much structure and focus on the end goal will, at least for me, derail the entire creative act.

Writing cultivates flowing, associative thought, the loss of time, and the spontaneous yet concentrated creation of something from nothing.

I have general writing goals, and I certainly have to impose discipline on myself to make room for writing in my day, but the generative process itself blessedly un-goal-oriented.

Goals and outcomes are all well and good for strategic planning, career paths, and athletic feats.But to similarly structure every aspect of life is to lose the art of it

via In Defense of Wasting Time.

That flow state is what I am in writing for. I can get it in other activities, but in the same way a heroin addict isn’t satisfied by a methadone hit, it’s writing I come back to for the most powerful hit.  (Drug addiction isn’t a frivolous comparison either, it literarily is the escape from self that we go looking for in narcotics.) Non-fiction can take me to the flow state consistently, but it’s fiction writing that really rings my bell.

Writing challenges us to do something that we are, as humans, terribly bad at doing. We’re trained by our culture and our schooling to be organised, productive, focused. We learn that if we want to achieve something we need to concentrate. All of these things are about asserting our self in the world. But writing demands the opposite. To write brilliantly we must forget ourself. We have to let go. And for most of us, letting go is haaaaaaard.

We want to make writing conform to our need for focus, productivity, organisation. We set word-counts. We aim to write a book a year.  We try and top the bestseller lists. But it’s all nonsense to make ourselves feel like we’re in control, when really the whole of writing is letting go of control. We want writing to not be a waste of time, when really the best thing about writing, is that it always will be.