The dance between form and flow
field notes from writing a book
Several weeks have come and gone since I last shared an update on the book writing process. Over the course of March, I found myself tangled up in a creative mess, unsure of what direction the project was headed in.
I’d intended to leave the garage door up, but as sawdust exploded across the room, I sheepishly rolled the door back down as I tried to make sense of the process. I know, I know — the whole point of this series (and process) was to get comfortable with welcoming the mess, but the fear of uncertainty got the best of me.
While piles of sawdust remain, I’m back with some semblance of how this journey will continue to unfold.
At the end of March, I met up with two close friends for a writing retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains.
For the six weeks leading up to the retreat, I focused on writing first draft essays, getting as many words and stories down on paper as possible. My plan was to arrive at the retreat with a first draft of the manuscript so I could spend the weekend exploring what central themes the stories would hang from, what format the book would take, and how the next few months of writing would shape up.
The original intention for the book was to gather a collection of essays — I figured it was simply a matter of shuffling drafts around until a table of contents emerged. But as I arranged and rearranged the drafts, more and more questions revealed themselves, unraveling the core assumptions that held the process together.
While part of me wanted to commit to the original plan and finalize the first draft, another part nudged me to take a step back to make space for something greater: a cohesive narrative interwoven with research backing my lived experience. The stories wanted to be cohered and coalesced, not compiled. I could feel myself resist the call, knowing this version of the project would be far more effortful than bundling a series of essays together.
Acts of creation, like writing a book, are generative by nature — unfolding through emergence rather than through force. Attempting to shape the shapelessness resulted in even more shapelessness.
Uncertainty loomed as I debated whether I was ready and willing to commit to many more months of this project.
Fortunately for me, amidst all the uncertainty, I was on the retreat with two women who I deeply trust, each navigating their own book journey. The fog of dread began to lift as they each shared their own creative blocks and challenges.
The big questions that had felt overwhelming began to lose their grip. As each debrief with them pulled me out of my own spiral, a shared rhythm began to emerge — an experience my friend,
, calls “creative regulation.”Our nervous systems began syncing through the act of shared creation and metabolizing doubt into possibility.
I call this creative co-regulation. A ‘group nervous system’ forms when we create together—one that can hold far more tension, complexity, and insight than any individual can alone.
And that’s exactly what happened for me at the retreat.
I could have second-guessed my seven-book realization. I could have talked myself out of it. But instead, I was surrounded by two amazing women who didn’t let me collapse into doubt. They helped me expand into clarity.
Creative co-regulation is how you go from second-guessing yourself in isolation to actually finishing—with sanity, momentum, and a crew of brilliant humans cheering you on.
— Kelly Wilde Miller, Creating in Community
I returned home with a greater capacity to hold the uncertainty and decided to retool how I’d structured my process.
When I first started the project, I’d resisted anchoring my progress to traditional publishing benchmarks, forgoing word count targets and timelines in favor of a more free-flowing creative process.
But inevitably, I felt the mounting tension between flow and form, needing structure to give shape to the ideas that spilled out in all directions. I began to realize that structure wouldn’t constrain my creativity, it would contain it.
In parallel to this process, I’ve been training for a half marathon. It was becoming clear to me just how helpful it was to have guardrails. Even if I was skipping a run here or there, at least I had a general sense of where I was on the map.
Rather than continue to resist a map, I took a step back to craft a clear timeline and set of milestones to work toward. I researched how long a typical non-fiction book is (roughly 70,000 to 120,000 words) and what timelines I’d need to operate on if I wanted to go the traditional publishing route instead of self-publishing.
Clarity around milestones and timelines allowed me to create and commit to a schedule that takes the thought out of what I need to work toward each week.
For the next 2-3 months, my main focus is continuing to write as much as possible with a target of 5,000 words per week and 20,000 words per month while pitching a few publications with sample chapters.
Unsurprisingly, it’s taken a move toward the middle way — a dance between form and freedom — to allow me to relax more deeply into the process.
If the first leg of the journey was about chasing flow and allowing stories to pour through me, this chapter is about allowing structure to guide me in shaping the remaining stories and grounding them in research.
As for the book: in between contemplating its future, I’ve drafted new chapters exploring weighty topics, tracing the arc of the Chinese American experience — reflecting on how far we’ve come since our ancestors first stepped foot in this country as unwelcome and unworthy immigrants.
It dawned on me that within my own lineage, our children’s generation will be the first of four generations to share the same cultural context as their parents, ending the cycle of cultural divide that began with their great grandparents.
As I’ve paged through the drafts, I revisited the stories that have become the scaffolding for my narrative repair — a process of healing the disconnection I had long felt from Chinese culture, and by extension, from my family system.
But more importantly, I’ve come to recognize that my experience is not mine alone — it’s a story that many Chinese Americans share: a set of family and cultural dynamics shaped by the Cultural Revolution and immigration. And now, it’s time to rewrite that story.
What creative projects have you found yourself entangled in? How have you navigated the tension between form and flow? Let us know in the comments :)
If you enjoyed this piece, here are my earlier reflections on the book writing process:
Thanks to for reviewing a draft of this essay.