Perell offers Macfarlane a metaphor for the writing process: white-water rafting downstream from A to B, the journey nuts in the middle, you hope to make it. Macfarlane corrects the metaphor for his own work: I was walking upstream.1
The correction is precise and operationally useful.
When you walk in a river, when you have your feet planted, you're fine. River is not going to push you anywhere. It's when you have to lift a foot to make progress. So one foot comes up and then you're only on one foot and the river is pushing you off balance.1
The body stable when both feet are planted. The body unbalanced the instant you commit to forward motion. The act of walking is the act of repeatedly destabilizing yourself.
Writing a book is like walking upstream in a river. You can get to a point, stabilize yourself, but when you come to take the next step, you lift that foot — that's when river knocks you off balance. It's also really exciting and that's how you make progress.1
Downstream-rafting captures one experience of writing — the project carrying you, the momentum doing the work, the writer holding on. This is accurate to some writers' experience of some projects, particularly later-stage work where the book has taken shape and the writing-flow is sustaining itself.
Upstream-walking captures the more typical experience for Macfarlane and for writers doing long-form discovery-work. The river of accumulated material, ideas, interview material, notebook fragments, is pushing against the writer — not malevolently, but because the writer is trying to move into territory that isn't downstream from where they're standing. Each forward step requires destabilization.
The accurate phenomenological insight: you don't progress by stability. You progress by allowing instability. The writer who refuses to lift a foot stays where they are. The writer who lifts a foot is briefly knocked off balance, and that's how the step gets made.
There's a second move in Macfarlane's metaphor that the downstream-rafting version doesn't capture: I found very strongly that the river was also showing me the direction. I didn't need to worry about direction. It felt very intuitive.1
You don't have to navigate upstream-walking from external maps. The river itself reveals where to step next. The current tells you the depth; the rocks tell you the stability of the next foothold; the gradient tells you what direction is upstream. The writer's job is to attend to the material and let the material direct the next step.
This is the discovery-writing principle in physical form. The book reveals its own direction when the writer attends to what is actually in front of them — the notebook fragment, the recurring image, the question that won't go away. The writer who tries to navigate from an external map (a pre-written outline; a publishing-target shape) misses the river's directional information.
Macfarlane: each step was — because the force of the flow of ideas and people and encounters and rivers themselves was so strong — it was unbalancing, torrenting in fascinating but not always easy ways.1
The flow that destabilizes is the same flow that contains the book. The ideas, people, encounters, and rivers themselves all push against the writer. The writer's commitment to upstream movement is what produces the destabilizing contact; the destabilizing contact is what produces the book.
A writer who hasn't been knocked off balance hasn't engaged with sufficient force of flow. A book written without destabilization is unlikely to destabilize the reader either. The flow is what carries the book's force; the writer's willingness to walk into it is what makes the force available.
Macfarlane and Pink's write-to-discover paradox converge on the principle that writing produces information the writer didn't have before writing. Pink frames it as paradox (discovery happens through the act); Macfarlane frames it as upstream-walking (the river reveals direction step-by-step). Both refuse the pre-planned-outline approach.
Macfarlane diverges from Karlsson's 5-step method on the source of destabilization. Karlsson's method assumes the destabilization happens before the writing (the year-long incubation; the magnetic-field-shaping; the cluster-formation), and the actual writing is a fast-and-stable write-through of an already-destabilized substrate. Macfarlane's upstream-walking has destabilization continuous through the writing. The split reveals two genuinely different relationships to destabilization in long-form work — Karlsson contains it pre-writing; Macfarlane lives in it throughout.
Walking-upstream-as-writing-metaphor maps onto two adjacent domains where the same productive-instability principle appears: psychology (the developmental tradition's understanding that growth requires sustained destabilization) and Eastern-spirituality (the contemplative tradition's understanding that liberation requires letting go of stable ground).
Psychology: Disequilibrium as Developmental Engine (Piaget) — Piaget's developmental psychology establishes that cognitive growth happens through cycles of disequilibrium (the existing mental schema no longer fits the encountered phenomenon) followed by accommodation (the schema is revised to fit) followed by new equilibrium (until the next destabilizing encounter). The cycle is structurally identical to Macfarlane's walking-upstream: stability (feet planted) is followed by lifting-foot (disequilibrium) which is followed by new stable foothold (accommodation) — and the writer cannot progress without the destabilization phase. The structural identity: both crafts identify productive-instability as the necessary phase of growth/progress, and identify avoidance-of-instability as the mechanism of stagnation. The insight neither domain generates alone: Macfarlane's writerly metaphor describes the same developmental architecture that Piaget specified for child cognitive growth — and writers who understand Piagetian disequilibrium have a developmental-psychology vocabulary for why upstream-walking works, while developmental psychologists who read Macfarlane see the long-form creative-practice instantiation of the cycle.
Eastern-Spirituality: Vairāgya — Letting Go as Foundation — the yogic and Buddhist traditions identify vairāgya (dispassion; letting-go) as a foundational practice. The practitioner who clings to stable ground (positions, identities, attachments) cannot make spiritual progress; progress requires sustained willingness to let go of ground that feels stable. The structural identity to walking-upstream is striking: both crafts identify the willingness-to-lose-current-stability as the precondition for what wants to be encountered next. The structural identity: both traditions treat the refusal to stay on stable ground as the necessary discipline for the form of progress the tradition is for. The insight neither domain generates alone: Macfarlane's writerly upstream-walking and the yogic tradition of vairāgya are operating on the same architecture — the writer and the contemplative both depend on willingness-to-be-destabilized as the structural precondition. A writer who has done contemplative practice understands viscerally what upstream-walking requires; a contemplative who reads Macfarlane sees the long-form creative-practice expression of the same architecture.
A third connection worth marking: walking-upstream has structural similarity to portal questions as book engine — both treat the writer's inability to know the answer in advance as the productive condition rather than the problem.
The Sharpest Implication
If walking-upstream is the accurate metaphor for long-form discovery-writing, then the publishing-industry expectation that writers know their book's shape before drafting (the book-proposal that sells the book before it's written) is structurally requiring writers to misrepresent their actual process. The uncomfortable implication: writers learn to write book-proposals that promise a shape they don't yet know how to deliver, then either (a) deliver the promised shape by suppressing the upstream-walking discoveries that would have made the book better, or (b) deliver a different book and apologize to the publisher. The publishing infrastructure rewards the first; the lasting books come from the second. Macfarlane's upstream-walking is structurally incompatible with the proposal-driven economy that most working writers must navigate.
Generative Questions