On Flow

I absolutely love reading novels when the writer has an idea of flow and rhythm in their work. I’m not big on flowery words or descriptions myself, but flow–ah, if a writer can make his or her prose sound like poetry, I’m sold.

Unfortunately, it’s one of those things about writing that is just so difficult to explain…and no, I don’t mean the caffeine addiction or the fact that some of us spend 95% of our allotted writing time searching the Internet for pictures of cats. You can talk about ‘flow’ until the cows come home and wonder, by the end of it, if you’ve said anything about it at all. But I’m going to try, because I haven’t written in this blog for a month and there’s cobwebs and mold and (heeey, speaking of which, my living room looks about the same…)

But I digress. When I say “flow”, I don’t mean the sound the toilet makes when you flush it. I mean the way the sentences and paragraphs in a novel–or any piece of writing, really–meld together. When writers are aware of flow, you can just hop into the piece and follow every scene, every train of thought, without a beat. All of this is done with a combination of clear, concise prose, the right amount of dialogue, the proper placement of commas, and the thoughtful use of white space.

See, I told you it’s hard to explain.

But with practice, you’ll know good flow when you see it. I’ve just finished editing a chapter of a writer who uses very deep, difficult words, yet because she is keenly aware of flow, the novel is beautiful to go through. It just works–even if she took a risk by picking a classic style to her prose. On that same note, I’ve read some novels that just sound like songs in my head because of how lovely the flow works. One of my favourite writers, Guy Gavriel Kay, is just excellent at this.

Anyway, just a little rant for Monday. And a little advice: the absolute, best way to know if a novel has good flow or bad flow? That headache, after you’ve done. Flow is imperative if a reader is to walk away without a massive migraine. So is lack of purple prose, of course, and the complete avoidance of phrases like “Throbbing, veined, cheese-wand” but that’s another topic for another day…