by Erik Nihil

Created on: May 31, 2008

The Creative Mechanism Series
Introduction: Optimal Performance

There are moments most humans are familiar with, moments when the mundane haze of reality is lifted and everything is more clear than before, moments when the senses are primed to levels of alertness reserved for fight or flight, when awareness extends somehow magically beyond our normal realms and exposes things to us in what seem to be flashes of intuition and epiphany. These moments of peak mental performance are often experienced in sports and music. In sports this mental condition is referred to as "the zone," when Ted Williams said he could see the stripes on the fastball, when basketball players see a larger basket, when time and space are distorted in such a way as to make the athlete's tasks much easier. In music it is known as "the groove," those moments when everyone in the band is completely aware of where and when he is in the song and what everyone else is doing, thus allowing the musicians to improvise unique emotional stylings within clearly felt time and progression parameters.

Authors experience comparative mental states, as do all artists when completely immersed in their work, but aside from the fact that these moments are extended and sustained for longer periods of time with the development of prose as compared with athletes or music, the writer has a unique task ahead of him. Writers, holistically speaking, are attempting to express the entire spectrum of human existence with mere words, which are in essence the symbolic representations of this spectrum of existence. Symbols representative of experience, words undergo changes over time, an evolution where connotations are lost and metamorphosed in the natural development of the language. The writer must be in tune with these changes in order to communicate effectively with his audience, and always this is the writer's number one objective-to communicate. In order to achieve this in the best possible way, the writer must work from a mindset where he sees his topic most clearly, and is thus able to communicate it clearly to the readers.

Through history, much has been speculated about this ability in the writer to see vividly creations of utter fantasy and then bring them to the rest of us mere mortals in a manner that allows us to suspend our disbelief and climb aboard for the ride. The ancient Greeks created minor deities known as muses to explain the magic of the creative process, as though this power came from outside ourselves,

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