Cornflour Power

What a dilatant mixture can teach us about creativity, resilience, and the power of slowing down.

Photo by Adrien Converse on Unsplash

Did you know that if you mix 300g of corn flour with 250ml of water you can make what’s called a dilatant mixture?

What does this mean? After mixing the corn flour and water, and stirring it in a bowl, eventually the resulting gloop will be too thick for the spoon to move through. But if you remove the spoon and slowly upend the bowl, the liquid will once again flow smoothly. Now plunge the spoon back in. Too quick and the mixture will thicken and resist, solidifying once more, but do it slowly and you’ll be fine.

You can take a hammer to this ‘liquid’, which it’s perfectly possible to pour and to run your fingers through, and it will shatter. Ditto if you throw it against a wall. It will break into bits, fall to the floor, and then re-liquify. But why?

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Also known as a ‘shear-thickening fluid’, a dilatant mixture is a substance whose viscosity increases as the force on it is increased. This means, the more effort you put into stirring the mixture, the more it will resist.

I didn’t know any of this that day — this would‘ve been 2013 or ‘14 I guess — I had my second meltdown in the British Library. The first had been a week before, when I’d walked there (only about half an hour, but it was still, y’know, effort) in order to do some writing. It hadn’t been going well, see, so I figured that the extra effort to get to St Pancras, plus the rarefied atmosphere of quiet concentration inside, would help me to work. I wasn’t quite as desperate as the character in the Jeanette Winterson novel (I don’t recall which) who’d padlocked themself to a chair in there, but deadlines were looming and progress wasn’t being made and I wasn’t that far off.

So I’d arrived, set up. Probably got myself a coffee. And then… nothing. Nothing came at all. Each word felt like pulling teeth and every twenty or so I ended up deleting them all anyway. After fifteen minutes I had nothing but a mounting sense of dread, and by thirty I had even less and was in full-on panic mode.

What did I do? I packed up, and left. I went home, feeling beyond frustrated, angry with myself and the world, and like I was utterly pointless and talentless and (my biological father’s favourite word for me, a word which still triggers me now) useless.

I tried again a week later. This time it would be different I told myself, this time I would crack my novel, and get well and truly back on track.

The same thing happened of course. Nothing came. The notebooks sat there, the cursor on my laptop blinked menacingly, but nothing good came.But this time, I forced myself not to bolt. I stayed, metaphorically handcuffed to that miserable chair, surrounded by all those people who were actually, y’know, achieving.

It didn’t help. In fact, it probably made it worse. With each passing moment I got more and more panicked, more and more miserable, more and more convinced I’d never write anything again, ever, let alone anything any good, and I was going to let everyone down. Eventually, after something like an hour (or even two) of spiralling, I admitted defeat. I packed up, having achieved less than nothing (because all I’d actually done was erode my confidence even further), and went home, where I no doubt caused a fight because I was both angry with myself and desperately, desperately unhappy.

I didn’t figure out what was going on for a long time, and even then only with the professional help of a wonderful coach with whom I still, occasionally, work. Because it’s an analogy that works for me, we talked about my work as if I was a show-jumper and the work itself the horse. As in, something I have some control over, but which is also wilful, with a weird power and mind of its own. On both occasions, I’d been in place, ready to ride, but the work had reared up at the first jump and refused to go over it. The first time I’d instantly left the ring, and given up. The second, I’d argued with the horse, trying over and over again to get it to make this jump when it clearly didn’t want to. Neither approach worked.

What I should’ve done, we decided, was simply ride around the ring. Looked at the jumps, with no pressure to do any of them, calmed down, then tried again. And if it still refused? Maybe try a smaller jump. it was great advice, and now if I’m not feeling it I will lower my target from 2000 to 1000 words, or even 500, or even 50. Sometimes I’ll tell myself just doing a bit of editing of what wrote the day before is enough.

And invariably, of course, I end up doing far more than I’d thought. The 50 words might not turn into 2000, but I often look up and find I’m cruising towards 1000. It’s as if I’ve tricked my brain into the state of flow, or perhaps tricked my horse by telling it we only need to do the jumps it wants to do.

Now, I tend to think of my work, not as a horse, but as a dilatant mixture. If I try to go at it too quickly, it resists. And once it’s begun to resist, the very best thing to do — the only thing in fact — is to actually slow down. I take a step back, go for a walk, tidy my kitchen, sort out my underwear drawer (no, I never do that, but it sounds like the kind of thing someone might do, right?) I might perhaps return and look at a different part of the work, or writes something else completely (a Substack post, for example). Gluing myself to the chair and trying to force it to come will rarely, if ever, yield results, and is in fact just as likely to cause it to shatter completely. Whereas a gentle coaxing, a slow movement through? That might just work.

The more I think of it, the more I wonder whether this applies to the whole of life, rather than just writing. But that’s a topic for a different time, perhaps…