Really, nearly everyone is skilled in some ways, even basic writing students. A person may be skilled at writing essays and personal letters but not fiction, at poetry and technical reports but not journalism. Asking them where, in a draft, they felt good about what they were doing, or found the writing easy, or were surprised by a new turn of thought, might help them identify strong places in the writing. Sure, writing's sometimes a struggle for most of us. I'm not trying to say that we could eliminate the suffering, or even should.
Frustration can be a powerful motivator, too.
But if we acknowledge the flow experience in ourselves and other writers, and learn to pick up on these experiences and look at the writing that gets done under those conditions, things might open up for us a little bit. In the Writing Center we're looking for ways to use writers' flow experiences. Often the source of energy is one sentence buried somewhere in the middle or at the end, one the writer considered just a maverick thought and might even have wanted to get rid of, because it messed up the smooth seamlessness of the rest. Sometimes, on the other hand, the real source of energy lurks somewhere around the edge of the draft, unwritten. Sometimes in the Writing Center we'll have an exciting session where the writer, having brought in a ho-hum draft, suddenly gets excited talking about the topic and finds a whole new way to approach it, one that will bring the writing to life.