Writing and Self Hypnosis

A friend of mine who is a writer, and who sometimes peruses this blog, has mentioned to me on a couple of occasions that his wife is convinced that he puts himself into a state of self hypnosis when he writes. I wasn't sure about this theory, initially, but began to notice that when my writing begins to flow I've often achieved a state where I shut out everything else and I've put myself into the fictional world that I am writing about. At this point the words come easier and faster, and I'm no longer letting the critic inside me over-analyze every word that comes off my fingers.

Of late my writing time has been much more limited and so I need to make the most of it. I'm up every morning before the rest of the family so that I can slide in a half hour or, if I'm lucky, an hour of writing. The problem is that it usually takes me about a half hour to get myself into this state of immersion inside the fiction I'm creating and I'm lucky to grind out a paragraph or two in the meantime.

In order to maximize my time, I've purposely tried to induce this state, which is perhaps hypnotic, that we've been discussing. I find that if I put on some music that 95% of the time I can drop right into the immersive state I'm seeking and the words and story almost immediately begin to flow.

A quick search of the internet shows that other writers have indeed used self hypnosis as a tool to combat writer's block. My old method to beat writer's block was to keep grinding away until finally I write my way through the block; sometimes it took days.

I'm sure that there are other tools and methods of self-hypnosis that might be applicable for writers, but music seems to be quite effective for drawing me into that immersive state where the words began to slide out of my consciousness instead of me having to force them out.