Hey friends,

Think for a moment about your own creative endeavors. Where is the line between creative play for personal satisfaction and deliberate practice for improving your skills? Is there a line? Does it matter? 

I’m not spiraling. Nope. Not at all. Anyway, here’s why I ask– 

I recently completed a six-week creative writing course with Gotham Writers Workshops. It was great to have dedicated time each week to focus on creative writing and to be in contact with other creatives. 

However, the best part of the course was the in-class writing exercises. Having a prompt and twenty minutes to write forced me to focus and trust myself, letting words dance across the page without restricting myself to too much editing or concern for how others might receive the story. It was a great reminder of one of the core principles Alice LaPlante anchors the exercises in Write Yourself Out of a Corner: constraints often encourage, not inhibit, creative thinking. 

But the content of the course itself didn’t quite have the level of rigor that I would have wanted to consistently push me to a more informed, capable depth of my creative writing skills. And, in hindsight, that’s probably because it was an introductory course. A 101. It wasn’t meant to be a course for experienced writers. I signed up for that one specifically because I wanted to go back to basics. I had gotten so out of practice with my writing that I felt like I needed to think like a beginner again. 

As it turns out, I may be less of a beginner than I realized. 

It reminded me of (douche alert!) my time studying at Oxford and the realizations that experience surfaced about my educational journey more broadly. For most of my undergrad, I didn’t push myself academically. I still don’t know how to study. I had the misfortune of being able to make A’s without much effort. Most of my essays were written on the spot, the morning they were due– ten pages, with citations and a clear thesis, all knocked out in about two hours. The first draft was good enough. Typically. 

At Oxford, however, I had to operate on another level. The tutor (professor, for us US-ians) made it clear from day one that none of us would get first marks (the equivalent of an A) and that she expected us to write and think not like undergrads, but as academics. For the first time in my learning career, I had to push myself. I wrote papers in advance. I (gasp!) read them and made edits before turning them in! I spent time laboring over my sources and scrutinizing texts to try to identify what I might be missing or what might be encased in subtlety and subtext that could require me to alter my thesis once unearthed. 

I’d never worked so hard at my studies. It was exhausting, but it was also really fun. The culmination of the program was an awareness of what I could do when pushed to apply myself, and the sobering realization that by not pushing myself up to that point, I’d hampered my growth. 

For the record, I didn’t get first marks, just as the tutor prophesied; those high second marks– the B+– could not have made me prouder.  

I came home from that program aware of what I could do when pushed, and it completely changed how I thought about my academics. I’d finally had an experience where my actions weren’t anchored in getting a passing grade, but in striving to master skills and knowledge in my domain. 

When my writing workshop didn’t push me to master skills at a deeper level, I found myself starting to drift– to zone out and abandon my note-taking. It had me wishing for a push, a challenge, that would deepen my understanding and force me to stay engaged. 

As I journaled about this experience and my desire for greater challenges, I realized that I’ve been mentally holding on to a tension that may be tripping you up, too. 

What my journaling uncovered for me was that I’ve been stuck feeling like there’s a dichotomy between creating for leisure and mastering creative skills. They often feel mutually exclusive, particularly in a cultural context where any hobby, especially those with which you attain a high sense of mastery, inculcates pressure to monetize your efforts or make the transition from hobby to professional endeavor. 

Part of my initial desire to return to a beginner’s mindset in my creative writing was that I had the most fun when I was a beginner. I could sit down and crank out pages and pages of crap, and loved doing so. Now that I’m aware when writing isn’t good, it’s harder to attain that kind of momentum. I thought that by returning to a low-pressure yet structured environment, I’d get back to that kind of beginner’s mindset. 

In hindsight, I think what may have better served me would have been the opposite: a push, a challenge, a kick in the ass. 

Our culture–especially with more and more thinking being outsourced to LLMs–teaches us to shy away from discomfort and embrace instant gratification. American consumerism, politics, and corporate strategy all seek to optimize for short-term rewards with little consideration of long-term impacts and outcomes. 

When it comes to creative endeavors, though, I don’t think there is a way to improve without discomfort. I don’t mean to imply that creative hobbies must be approached with business-like rigor, or that doing things for enjoyment is any less valuable than doing things for skills acquisition. Instead, I think the two are intertwined. 

I had a different thesis in mind when I sat down to write this piece, but the more I wrote, the more I realized how pertinent Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow is to this conversation. 

Maybe you’ve experienced being in a flow state before. Flow is characterized by a state of intense focus in which time seems to melt away, and you’re fully immersed in the task at hand. It’s found among writers, artists, athletes, and just about any activity that has a clear goal, a feedback mechanism, and a level of challenge calibrated to the participant’s skill level. 

Entering a flow state is what Csikszentmihalyi describes as an “optimal experience,” which tends “to occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something that is difficult or worthwhile.”

What I want to underscore here is that difficulty is intrinsically tied to flow. If you engage in an activity that is impossible or significantly beyond your skill level, it results in feelings of defeat and burnout. If the activity is too easy, you get bored and distracted. The task at hand has to be hard enough to keep you engaged without being so difficult that you’re compelled to give up. 

It’s that calibration of challenge that was missing from my writing workshop. It was good. I enjoyed it. I liked the instructor… but I wasn’t pushed. I wasn’t challenged. I didn’t have the right level of difficulty to become fully immersed. When so much of my corporate work life feels like drudgery, what I crave– what I need– is that sense of immersion that comes with overcoming challenges and growing. The easy, gentle, everyone gets a gold star for participating approach may work for some. For me, it feels like a continuation of the instant gratification culture that precipitates enshittification. 

I’ll take busting my ass for a B over scratching out papers in an hour for an A these days. 

-Blake 

Continuing the Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi hype train this week, I’ll recommend diving into his book Creativity. While not as famous or seminal a text as his work on flow, it is a continuation of the topic that anyone would benefit from reading.

The doomscrollers would have you believe that physical culture is on its deathbed — that everything tactile and local is slowly being swallowed by the algorithm. Independent bookstores didn't get that memo. According to the American Booksellers Association, 422 new independently owned bookshops opened across the U.S. in 2025 alone, a 31% jump from the year before. Since 2020, the total number of indie bookstores in the country has grown by 70%. Community-rooted, curation-forward, stubbornly physical — they're not just surviving, they're expanding.

This week, I’m going to borrow from the book I referenced in the epigraph at the top of this issue, Sol Stein’s Solutions for Writers. In it, Stein emphasizes the importance of opening lines for hooking readers and setting the tone for the story to come. I also want to continue to push us, as a community, to embrace challenges.

So, for this week, the exercise I recommend is this:

Write the opening line of a story about someone who discovers that they’ve been wrong about something they hold dear for their entire life.

Just write the opening line. And then write it again. And then write it again. See how many versions you can come up with. What hooks you? Where do you lose focus? What makes you want to keep writing? To keep reading?