Tag Archives: the zone

‘All-American Girl’ and the Flow

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(This article uses affiliate links. If you click on a link that takes you to Amazon and you buy a product, we get a commission. It doesn’t cost you anything extra.) In Meg Cabot’s All-American Girl, Samantha Madison is an artist, who loves to draw. When she talks about her art, she says:

When you are drawing, it is like the whole world around you ceases to exist. It is just you and the page and the pencil… When you are drawing, you are not aware of time passing, or what is happening around you. When a drawing is going really well, you could sit down at one o’clock and not look up again until five, and not even have any idea that so much time has gone by until someone mentions it, because you have been so caught up in what you are creating…

When you are drawing, you are in your own world, of your own creation.

And there is no world better than that.

The Flow

Mihály Csikszentmihalyi called this “the flow.” It is a state as Cabot describes it through her narrator, Madison. You can achieve this state through other endeavors, including sports, when solving a complex problem, and when participating in other creative activities. It is also known as “in the zone.”

‘All-American Girl’

All-American Girl is a quasi-romance seen through the eyes of a 15-year-old girl, who happens to save the President’s life. It comes with all the angst, worry, and love triangles that you might expect from the genre. It also faces the question of learning how to become one’s true self.

Creativity Notes

If you want drawing to be your thing, I recommend joining our Patreon and looking at the 2025 Advent Calendar for easy ways to draw Christmas. If you want to learn more about creativity, check out my books:

The ABCs of Creativity: Zone

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When someone is “in the zone,” he or she is exhibiting the highest level of his or her talent through a seemingly effortless expenditure of energy. Michael Jordan’s 38 pts, 7 rebound, five assists, three steals and a block stat line while having the flu or his hitting six triples against Portland and shrugging about it after being criticized for his lack of three-point shooting skills are both great examples of being in the zone. Athletes are most often described this way because they are most often in the limelight, but artists, scientists and hobbyists can feel as if they are in the zone or, as creativity pioneer Csikszentmihalyi called it, “the flow.”

In Csikszentmihalyi’s “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention,” he describes part of the creative process as “the flow” and says that there are nine elements that characterize the flow:

  • Clear goals with no ambiguity: In the case of Jordan’s basketball games, the goal is clear; put the ball in your hoop. Whether you do it or you get a teammate to do it, the ball needs to get in your hoop.
  • Immediate feedback: The ball either goes in the hoop or it doesn’t. The feedback is immediate.
  • Challenge and skills are balanced: This is a little more difficult to illustrate. Basically, the question is whether or not the person’s skills are balanced with the challenge he or she is facing. If the challenge is too easy or too difficult, the person will not be able to enter the flow. It’s when the two are in alignment that the person enters the flow state.
  • Action merges with awareness: The person is focused on what he or she is doing. They do not think about anything other than the activity in the here and now.
  • No distractions: They exclude distraction from their minds. They are in the moment.
  • No concern about failure: The activity that the person is involved in is too consuming to give the person the opportunity to worry about failing or the outcome of failure.
  • No self-consciousness: The activity is too consuming for the person to be worried about how he or she appears to the outside world.
  • Time changes: Things slow down and time speeds up so that while the person is doing the activity, every detail can be examined, everyone else around him or her is slower, but when the activity is over the person doesn’t feel as if any time at all has passed. He or she loses track of time.
  • The activity is the end not the means to an end: If the activity is itself the goal and the required means to get to a greater goal, it becomes easier to enter the flow. If an author is writing to write a book and not to publish it or make money from it, he or she is more likely to enter the flow.

Getting into the flow creatively is why artists are depicted as absent-minded or the author doesn’t her someone calling out to him while he or she sits at the typewriter. It’s also what makes creativity so rewarding. Being in the flow indicates the person is operating at his or her highest possible ability without being overwhelmed. Get in the flow, or the zone, if you prefer, become more creative.

For more on creativity, check out, “Disneyland Is Creativity,” “The Haunted Mansion Is Creativity,” and “Penguinate! Essays and Short Stories for Greater Positive Creativity.” If you want more content like this, join our Patreon.