Getting “in the zone.”

Once upon a time, I was a teenage band geek. And I was hardcore, baby. Our band competed on a national level. We had an interstate rival, used to do physical work outs, the whole bit. I learned more life skills in that class than I did in all of my other activities combined – how to be organized, change plans on the fly, be productive in downtime.

Band is also where I learned to focus. I used to plug myself  into my Walkman, and play a cassette full of inspirational music. By the time I got through side A, I’d be so focused on the task at hand that an alien attack wouldn’t break my concentration. It was kind of scary – our bus would transform from a typically loud and obnoxious bunch of teenagers to a silent machine in the space of about twenty minutes.

Time passes, and old habits fall away. But sometimes I find myself back “in the zone” when I am writing. Have you ever written  something, and read it later to find that the words will look strange, foreign, as if someone else wrote them? It’s eerie.

My biggest frustration is that I can no longer seem to control this ability. There are simply days where I have a hard time falling into that writing trance.

Does anyone else do this when they write? If so, how do you get into “the zone?”