How Do We Get Lost (in a Book)?

/ Books, Reading / By

This is Part II in a series of posts in which I explore what it means to get lost in a book and how it happens. (Read Part I HERE.)

A question worth asking at the outset is: Do you like getting lost? (Which is to say, Are you okay with the surrender inherent to the fact of not knowing where you are or where you are going?)

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At this point, I am still conflating getting lost in a book with flow state. Maybe I’ll continue to hold this position. I’m open to changing my mind, though. It’s entirely possible that getting lost in a book is different from a flow state.

Here’s a list I made early on while thinking about how one makes a book that holds a reader in rapt attention:

  1. Understand what flow state is, how to achieve it in general1
  2. Understand which literary elements contribute most to flow
  3. Understand the unique combination of above elements
  4. Also important: specific things are absent from a flow state
  5. Such as: certainty, expectation, demand, mind

OOOH, I thought, as I wrote #5. Clearly the mind is not absent when in a flow state. But a particular portion of the mind is turned off or quieted. I call this portion of mind more specifically the mental mind, the modern mind, the psychoanalyzed/ing mind. This mind is notable for anxiety and craving. Anxiety and craving are notably absent during a flow state.

I don’t know about you, but the books I tend to get lost in are fiction.2 While I read plenty of poetry and informational nonfiction, I am unlikely to lose track of time or my sense of self while doing so. Why is this?

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Think for a second about a book you have been lost in: What book was it? Where were you? When did it happen? How did it happen? Have you revisited the book since?

Now, for the writers in my audience: think about the last time you were in a flow state while you were writing: What were you writing? Where were you, when were you, how did it happen? What brought you out of the flow state?

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The first line of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is: “The day begins in the middle of the night.” This is Nick speaking; the book alternates chapters between Nick and Norah’s perspectives (interestingly, David Levithan wrote Nick’s pov and Rachel Cohn wrote Norah’s—it’s possible that much of the sense of this book’s movement comes from the fact that it did, in fact, move between authors). We are immediately dropped into a scene in which music is happening. Nick is the bassist in a queercore band (but he’s straight) and he’s on stage. Next, almost right away, we get a brief philosophical meditation on time: “I am the clockwork, I am the one who takes this thing called music and lines it up with this thing called time. I am the ticking, I am the pulsing, I am underneath every part of this moment.” Right here, we know that Nick is a poet, a dreamer, AND he is also someone who values—to the point of his own discomfort—stability.

By the end of the chapter—8 pages in, and this seems important, the brevity of the chapters to establish a bit of a breakneck pace, because this is a container story3 and it will be over by the end of this night (actually, early morning, but you know, when you are a musician and/or young and/or into bands and live music, just as the first line declares, the day begins in the middle of the night, and the night ends around//after dawn, which does the double work of letting us know we’re in a specific world, where specific rules apply)—we know what Nick wants, why he can’t have it, AND equally important, by page 7, we have seen him see Norah: “…the girl next to me puts two fingers in her mouth to whistle old-fashioned style.” (Nice pleasure nod here, calling attention right to her mouth in a non-sexual way.) A page and a half later, in the final moment of Chapter One, Nick turns to Norah and and says, “I know this is going to sound strange, but would you mind being my girlfriend for the next five minutes?”

I don’t know about you, but for me as a reader, I AM NOT GOING TO STOP NOW.

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Chapter Two is Norah’s. It takes her 4 full pages to answer Nick’s question—during which time we get to hang out in Norah’s rangy, intelligent, observant mind, gaining an understanding of who she is, what she wants, and what she’s up against. She’s a rich girl who rejects the typical markers of wealth; she loves music to the point of disobeying her dad’s unspoken rule of not visiting the club she’s currently in, despite otherwise being a model daughter; she knows without a doubt that despite what acquaintances tell her, Nick is “No Mo”; her main goal for the night is to get her party-girl best friend home safe. Importantly, what she wants externally is different from what Nick wants. Internally, though—well, when she answers him, not with words but with her lips, we know she wants the same thing he does. THIS IS ON.

By the time Nick and Norah kiss, on page 13(!), a whole bunch of craft elements have come into play. We’ve got round characters via purposeful, voice-driven, first-person POVs; a strong sense of setting (place and time); all kinds of desires; a plot and potential subplots; mood, tone, and style; not to mention, a philosophical/existential/intellectual vantage on young love.

All of this tension (working in tandem with the curiosity4 of “what will happen next?”) is immediately heightened by the entrance into the scene of Nick’s very recent ex-girlfriend (as in, she broke up with him “three weeks, two days, and twenty-three hours ago”), who just so happens to be Norah’s private school frenemy.

This story is leaving the station, and I’ll be damned if I’m not on that train. Or, perhaps in keeping with my getting lost metaphor: I am about to chase headlong after these two kids, into the tangle of streets of one wild NYC night.

Two things to note: 1) I am all in on these characters! I relate to these characters5, and I am rooting for these characters. 2) PACING.

I think we’re going to have to talk more about pacing in the next post. Because I’m pretty sure pacing is a huge part of what induces flow state/lost-in-a-book state.6

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(Yet) Another question before we go: When you are lost, does time speed up or does time slow down?

NOTES

  1. I’ve decided against getting into what a flow state is, and how to achieve it generally, in these posts. There’s been so much written about it, including the book called Flow. I’ll also link here again to Ted Gioia’s article which sparked this series: How We Lost the Flow ↩︎
  2. It also happens with a certain type of nonfiction—CNF or lyric essays—which (I know I’m not supposed to!) I categorize with fiction in my brain when thinking about getting lost. Story or narrative clearly has something to do with it. ↩︎
  3. During my very first MFA residency a million years ago, Christine Sneed gave a craft talk on container stories; it convinced me to work with her that semester, which was transformative, and I quite frequently return to the ideas of structuring time in my stories via some kind of specific container. ↩︎
  4. The READER’s curiosity. But I do wonder: is the reader’s curiosity a direct descendent of what was once the authors’ curiosity? (“No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” ― Robert Frost) ↩︎
  5. Worth noting here, and I will probably expound upon this further elsewhere: These characters are roughly my peers, falling in love in a city I once knew intimately. Not every book is for every reader, and that should always be noted/taken into consideration, but in this case, the familiarity of place, of headspace, of language, of feeling, it all adds up to appeal to me, specifically right now, in what I deem “my nostalgic age.” ↩︎
  6. An author whose work I consistently get lost in, even upon rereading, is Emily St. John Mandel, who quotes VELOCITY as one of her core writer values. ↩︎