When I say “flow,” you say…

What is this thing called flow? We hear the word tossed about in regards to creativity, sports, or generally presence, and I often wonder what exactly should I expect it to mean. One can have flow, a noun, and one can perform flow, a verb. But what precisely does it look like? What does it sound like? Flow. It’s a short, little word used to explain expansive concepts. And could it possibly be that we miscommunicate when we talk about flow?  

Check it out:

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” – Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu                               

“I like records that flow really well and you don’t have to skip around because there’s lot of different jumps.” – Norah Jones

“A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.” – Honore de Balzac

“British fashion is self confident and fearless. It refuses to bow to commerce, thus generating a constant flow of new ideas whilst drawing in British heritage.” – Alexander McQueen

“Guys from the other teams have told me they see that I’m too tense when I’m shooting free throws, when I’m concentrating so much instead of just letting it flow.” –  Dwight Howard

Is it just me, or do these uses of flow point to similar abstract, but also nearly indefinable meanings? My general understanding of flow includes movement, some fluid transition between two or more elements or states—events, songs, sentences, ideas, or physical transitions from the above examples. Connected movement. Fluidity. But what precisely makes flow fluid? What gives the movement a certain ease of motion? It’s that difficult reflexivity of words that causes problems of definition.

-- “How would you define flow?”

-- “Um, it’s something that flows?”

So, I’ll narrow in on language here because as movement between two states of being can be measured in all kinds of scientific ways, and well, trying to dissect the “flow of life” is a bit of a lofty task.

Stringing a bunch of words together to make meaning in what we call a sentence can happen in a number of ways. A writer can use rhythm, pace, style, diction, syntax, sound and many other tools to spin words into sentences, to link them in paragraphs. A writer could say she pays attention to all the above separately, but I might call that girl a liar, or at least an overachiever. Organizing all of the elements of narrative into one sentence, and then into paragraphs and sections to create an entire story is hard enough without complicating the process by systematically filtering through the subsets of this esoteric thing called flow. No, I’d say, teaching someone to write prose with flow, or explaining it at all, has the same inexact quality as trying to conclusively define flow. Therefore, flow appears to be in part the product of intuition.

You know it when you see it. And you hear it when it’s absent. You can even feel it flow on the lips, or roll off the tongue. Creating flow is instinctual, in a way, a technique that cannot simply be taught by adding x to y to z and counting syllables. But I do believe flow can be developed over time with dedicated practice, much in the way children can learn to play the piano by ear.

Read aloud. Listen to how the sentence unfolds. Listen to how it ends and drifts into the next, how it unifies the thought, themes, characters, sounds, etc. into a paragraph. Many writers swear by this practice and there’s more than one reason why. Take a minute and read this passage aloud.

“There was really no point trying to arrange wildflowers. They had tumbled into their own symmetry, and it was certainly true that too even a distribution between the irises and the rosebay willow herb ruined the effect. She spent some minutes making adjustments in order to achieve a natural chaotic look. While she did so she wondered about going out to Robbie. It would save her from running upstairs. But she felt uncomfortable and hot, and would have liked to check her appearance in the large gilt mirror above the fireplace. But if he turned—he was standing with his back to the house, smoking—he would see right into the room.” – Ian McEwan, Atonement (pg. 22)

The paragraph goes on, but there’s enough here to discuss the alchemy of flow therein. The first sentence, in its terse beauty, can be recited in one easy breath. It’s a clear statement from inside the head of Cecilia Tallis, no extra words inserted, and carries in its flow a unique voice. (I’ll tackle that enigmatic term “voice” at a later date.) The next sentence, approximately two lines long, lengthens the idea of the first thought and shows movement with the active “tumbled.” The “irises” coupled with “rosebay willow herb” displays McEwan’s attention to syllables and sound, for had he used “crocuses” or “clematis” with “irises,” the rhythm would have been slightly interrupted. Three shorter sentences follow, picking up the pace.

Notice the sibilance of “She spent some minutes making adjustments” and the plosive sounds in “chaotic look.” Those three short sentence-bursts mimic the quick turn thoughts can make from one thing to another. The next two sentences both start with the word “But,” also mirroring the decision-making process, and are chopped up into smaller bits, slowing the pace here. I love that extra pause within the em dashes, between “house” and “smoking,” where we see Robbie both in Ceclia’s thoughts and physically where he stands and smokes. Reaching the end of this passage, note another element of flow I’ve overlooked until now… punctuation.

In David Jauss’ article “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow,” he highlights varied sentence structure as a foundational aspect of flow. This is key. He uses a story about Ford Maddox Ford and the first paragraph from D.H. Lawrence’s “Odour of Chrysanthemums” to illustrate how varying sentence structure and length—the paragraph’s sentences range from 6 words to 62—creates flow. He notes how prose today, trends toward using mostly the basic sentence structures, simple and compound, and underusing complex structures, with branching modifiers, repetition, inversion and several other techniques, are shaping more dissonant prose. Essentially, no flow. And Jauss chalks this up to one main factor: “The most important reason we overuse simple structures is that we’re excessively afraid of not writing clearly.”

Oh, literary conundrums. If any of this flow issue is remotely interesting to you, I highly recommend Jauss’ book, Alone With All That Could Happen, which tackles many more literary puzzles like point of view and the ups and downs of present tense. Though, concerning flow, dissecting it and reaching its heart loops us back into the ethereal effect of good writing. The reader not only understands what is happening to the characters without difficulty, in fact with ease and pleasure, but also notices the deeper meaning rising like mist between the letters and syllables and commas. The purpose for telling the story at all hovers at the edges unhindered by style because it has flow. James Baldwin says it better:

“The hardest thing about writing, in a sense, is not writing. I mean, the sentence is not intended to show you off, you know. It is not supposed to be “Look at me! Look, no hands!” It’s supposed to be a pipeline between the reader and you. One condition of the sentence is to write so well that no one notices that you’re writing.”