It's Your Flow

 

 Writing about writing is becoming a 2020 thing for me. 

Sitting down to put words to paper (text to word processor?) is tough. The discipline to just begin even with no thoughts in your head about where to go is hard to do. In order to call yourself a writer you need to write. When I started out doing a regular blog I had to learn this. Before the blog though I just had my own half baked theories. I’d start out with a few paragraphs and hope to get 500 words or so. That’s still the number I shoot for when everything else is off and I can’t seem to get enough words together on a particular topic. But writing paragraphs got me started.

The tradeoff I made with myself was getting to write whatever nonsense popped into my head. It didn’t need to make sense either and the topic could veer wildly from side to side like a terrorist firing an Uzi in a shopping mall. The idea was just start.  Complete the required word count and save it in some file you had to look at all the time. Every time I saved another one I’d get to see how many complete writings I’d had already. Well, complete means different things to different people. “Saved copies” is more to the point. But it felt like earned success. After a few months I started cleaning them up a bit for readability. Also I checked them for what I call “flow”. I can already hear my English teacher saying frustratingly “There is no such thing as flow. It’s not a descriptive word. It doesn’t mean anything”.

Here is what I mean by flow: lacking those awkward stumbling phrases that people trip over. If you’ve ever read anything technical you’ll know what I mean. Good writing is clear and doesn’t hurt your brain to read it. Some ideas might make you stop and read them again, their definitions not well understood. But tripping over words is as frustrating as tripping over rocks on a trail hike. The best way to avoid them is to read the sentence out loud and see if it sounds clunky or awkward. I learned this by writing marketing pieces for websites. Reading should be enjoyable. Don’t make a potential client unhappy with your laborious copy. Don’t make them say your flow is off, you’ll lose a job.

Flow also refers to cutting out sentences that are unnecessarily long. I used to say things like “Well, I think that…” and finish the thought within the frame of a sentence. Not realizing how unnecessary those words are. They don’t add weight in an intellectual sense. Everyone reading knows you think it because you said it. Extra words are easily clipped for the sake of flow, not mention redundant thoughts. I’m bad about repeating myself when I really want to hammer a point home. I like to repeat things is what I’m saying. They’re important see--so I say them again. I might even add a supporting quote to the exhaustive point I mean for you to get. 

 It’s a tough habit to break but being aware of the tendency is a start.

I learned how to re-write from Stephen King’s book “On Writing”. His method is to write whatever is in your head and go back and clean it up later. It sounds like common sense but what he means is, say everything no matter how nasty or false to get it out of your head. There may be some good ideas that come out of it. And the real concern is that we get caught editing our work while still trying to pull out ideas. Don’t worry about grammar until later or you'll miss a creative opportunity. Don’t worry about flow until later either—that’s me not Stephen King.

When attacking armies get overrun they fall back to a fixed position. My fixed position in writing is journaling. When I struggle for ideas (like right now for instance) on what to write, I fall back to it. It’s easy to remember what happened early in the day, yesterday or even last week. It’s personal and because it’s personal it’s easy to recall. It works by priming the pump of my creative juices and easing me into a typing groove. It has to be typing by the way. I can hardly write with a pen anymore. It’s really embarrassing when taking notes at work too. I take the laptop whenever possible.

Flow can also mean avoiding off topic information that doesn’t fit the style. It’s going all Tom Clancy on the detailed interior of a nuclear submarine when a one sentence description will do. I run into this myself when writing a particular article in two different takes or on two different days. The first doesn’t match the second because my frame of reference isn't the same. Research is the culprit. If I’d read quite a lot on nuclear subs the material will reflect it, even if the article is supposed to be light hearted. This is the equivalent of being at a dinner party and babbling on about the last Netflix show you watched. The guests will show interest for a while but eventually the details will bore even the most gracious of listeners. They might say your flow is off.

If any of the guests at the party are English teachers they certainly won’t.