Against "Flow"

I was recently contacted by a student who asked if I would write a blog entry on “flow,” and seeing as I haven’t done one of these craft blogs in a while, I figured I probably should. . . .

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What is writing?

Seriously.

What’s the essential activity, once you boil all the romance away?

If you guessed making shit up, you are wrong.

If you guessed deploying language to divine human truth, you are both wrong and pretentious.

If you guessed the brief, painful phase that comes after several hours of procrastination, you are technically correct, but vague.

Writing is decision making.  Nothing more and nothing less.  What word?  Where to place the comma?  How to shape the paragraph?  Which characters to undress and in what manner?  It’s relentless.


--Steve Almond, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey

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In my workshops and classes, I have a rule banning the use of the word “flow”—what I call the other F-word. (Incidentally, the regular F-word is fine for use in my classes. Sometimes even ideal.)

I tell students, unless you are reading about fountains, faucets, or feminine hygiene commercials, you should never use the word “flow” in your feedback to another writer. I have a “flow jar” into which we put a dollar if we slip up and use the word. (At the end of the semester, we’ll spend it frivolously on burgers and shakes; there’s always enough cash to ensure that everyone eats until full.)

I detest this word. Flow.

So why do we instinctively reach for this particular abstraction in order to talk about art--how a story or poem either “flows” or “does not flow”--and what does it really mean? 

The answer to the first part of that question would seem to be rather simple: giving feedback is hard. If you want to say something helpful, useful, insightful, illuminating, or wise about someone else’s story or poem, it takes a lot of thought, a lot of hard work. Many workshop participants don’t have the time, or the training, or the scruples, or the necessary access to peace and quiet, to do a really good job responding to each other. And so, regrettably, they cut corners instead of remedying their problems. We get little more than gut reaction. Useless feedback.

Add to this the pressure of needing to contribute—a pressure we both put on ourselves (who amongst us doesn't want to be the one to say something in workshop that gets everyone “ooh-ing” and “ahh-ing?”), and a pressure that is placed on us tacitly by the workshop structure (you’re here to comment)—and it is a recipe for “flowy” disaster.

Flow is easy. Like most abstractions, it’s a catch-all, can mean whatever you want it to mean. When I say to you that I "liked the flow of your opening paragraph" (or didn't), you can accurately determine the following:

• That I read your opening paragraph (no telling how well I read it, though)
• That I either liked it or didn't like it

Beyond that, I could be responding to any (and all) of the following craft issues:

• Syntax (word order)
• Diction (word choice)
• Sentence structure (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex, fragment)
• Voice (your individual, idiosyncratic manner as author—maybe we both love gerunds!)
• Style (the particular approach you've chosen to take in writing this piece—formality vs. informality, for instance)
• Tone (the mood or atmosphere of the writing—serious vs. comedic, for instance)
• Rhythm (the musical, syllabic qualities of the writing)
• Dialogue (how and when characters speak to each other)
• Transitions (movement from one section or idea to the next)
• Pattern (the way your scenes develop in context with one another)
• Temporality (the way you move through time)
• Consistency of Point of View (specifically, person and tense)
• Clarity of Punctuation (or other grammatical concerns)
• Pace (how fast the plot/action develops)
• even the Description itself!

That’s an awful lot of options for one word. And I’m sure if we all sat down and made a list, we’d come up with plenty of other topics to which “flow” could also refer. You see my point. When someone praises or criticizes a piece of writing for its flow, what that person is really saying is, “I thought the writing was good/bad, but I couldn't (or couldn't be bothered to) figure out why I felt that way. Good luck.”

Flow goes against everything that Steve Almond is arguing for in the quote above. (A small aside: I feel both validated and bitter over that quote because I've been saying that writing is nothing more than decision making for ten years now, and any time I bring it up, my writer friends assume I took it out of Almond’s book.) Writing is relentless, as Almond points out. Flow is not. It’s simple, lazy, prepackaged and reheated at a moment's notice. We need simply nod our heads and say, “oh, yes, flow—I do see. How elusive. That je ne sais quoi of the story/essay/poem.”

Flow hearkens back to those hippy-dippy workshops that were en vogue for a while. One can almost imagine the group joining hands in a circle and singing “Kumbayah,” painting by numbers and waiting for the muse to descend or some such nonsense. Instead of rolling up your sleeves like your local auto mechanic or your washing machine repair-person, or—if you prefer—the many sculptors of antiquity whose art preceded us, and really getting your hands dirty, with flow you have no choice but to take your shot in the dark, hoping that the next time around the piece will be better somehow. This is not learning.

So what do we do? Well, for starters, we can stop using the F-word. We can slow down our feedback, consider the list items above (and those items on your own personal list) and try to better articulate what it is that we appreciate about a piece of writing, what confuses us, and what fails to meet our expectations. Let’s look at an example, shall we?

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Admittedly, Joyce is not one of my favorite authors. (Too many silly epiphanies to offend the contemporary writer’s sensibility.) But there is no denying the beauty of this paragraph from “The Dead.” If I brought it into a workshop, I expect that we might pick at it a bit—too much repetition maybe, too many adverbs, a word here or there that seems a bit antiquated—but on the whole, we would agree that it has a great “flow,” would we not?

Much better than, say, this alternative I've whipped up:

Something tapped at the window pane. It was snow. It fell in the light from the streetlamps. It was time to go west. The newspaper said it was snowing all over Ireland. It was snowing on the central plain, in the Bog of Allen, and even in the mutinous Shannon waves. It was also falling in the cemetery where they’d buried Michael Furey—all over the crosses, and headstones, and whatnot. His soul swooned. He heard the snow fall through the whole universe, on all the dead and the living.

So in the context of these two examples, what might we say about flow? 

What makes “He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight” so much better than “It fell in the light from the streetlamps?” 

Why do we appreciate the sonic quality of “falling softly” contrasted later with “softly falling” in the first example (that diction) and not the brevity of “It was snow” in the second? (I’ll give you a hint, it has something to do with the way snow falls.)

What do we notice about noun choice, sentence structure, the use of to-be verbs, etc.?

And why is it better to end on the word “dead” instead of the word “living?” (beyond, of course, the title of the story.)

If I wanted to answer all those questions and more, it would take me some time, and this would become a very long blog entry. So I am not going to try to answer them. This isn't, after all, a workshop. But if it were a workshop, you better believe I’d take that Joyce paragraph apart to praise at least some of what made it so powerful—especially if doing so would help me explain why a different paragraph in the same story wasn't working. You wouldn't hear a peep about flow. 

Along with this careful approach toward reading, we need to stop treating each other’s (and our own) writing like sacred cows. Just because it's black and white (words on paper or screen) doesn't mean that writing (draft work especially) is a sacred cow. It isn't. When a story, essay, or poem works, it evokes a strong response in its reader (usually a positive one, hopefully a heartbreaking one). Sometimes, getting there means treating that piece like the victim of a rough interrogation, not like an honorable member of the royal family who stopped in for tea. If you can’t get past revering everything you write like it’s your precious, it probably means you haven’t written enough and you’re holding on too tight to your body of work. If you can’t get past treating other people’s work that way, it probably means you’re too worried about winning “Miss Congeniality” and not worried enough about helping people to improve their writing.

I’m not advocating for cruelty toward one another (or toward oneself)—if you are taking a workshop, you hopefully and presumably understand the difference between constructive criticism and below-the-belt insults. I don't recommend you be contentious for the sake of being contentious—we've all see those loudmouth types in workshop, the people who would be better off not speaking at all, as Mark Twain reminds us. What I am saying is that good feedback—whether praise or criticism—always has an element of specificity about it; that's what makes it good feedback. As such, it represents an investment of time and mental energy, and is therefore an act of generosity, gifted from one writer to another.

So, take out a piece of paper and show the writer one alternative way he or she might have approached that opening paragraph that “failed to flow.” Explain why it’s better. 

Or pull out some colored pens or pencils and underline all the different sentence structures. Is there variety? Does the writer have tics that he or she may be unaware of?

Compare a good paragraph in the writer’s work to a lousy one—go line by line, word by word, if you have to. 

For good measure, photocopy a few stories or poems that the person should read.

And if the workshopee resents that level of involvement, don’t waste your effort next time through the cycle. Do whatever you have to do to be a solid citizen in the class, but don’t break your back trying to change that person’s attitude. Most likely, that person isn't cut out to be writer at this time, and the work will be beyond help.

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Agree? Disagree? As always, please feel free to post your questions, comments, and thoughts below.

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