What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow
Asking students to develop their own diagnostic chops
In project-based writing, students pitch ideas for creative writing projects to their classmates. The pitch launches a six- or nine-week project cycle devoted to the development and revision of a single piece of writing. Each student has a different project per cycle, and students leave the class having completed 4-6 different creative writing projects.
One of the best aspects of this framework is a process I’ve written about a lot called “Inquiry Week,” where students give copies of their work-in-progress to the class with 3-5 open-ended questions in order to get feedback on specific elements of the piece. One question must always be: “What is working in this draft?
Many students write inquiry questions about the mysterious expository ingredient called “flow.” Every time I see a question about flow, I ask them, “What do you mean by this?” Because for as many students who want feedback on this illusive element, there are just as many definitions.
There’s a few reasons for this.
First, flow isn’t a writing element per se. It is the effect of many elements working together in harmony to produce a confident effortlessness on the page. It’s the assurance of voice, the rhythm of syntax, the delight created by just the right word. It’s the scene that delivers economical action, the line of dialogue that rings true, the single sentence paragraph that drops the never-saw-it-coming ending.
Secondly, while flow seems to describe the motion of something–the current of a river or the fall of silk–it more readily aligns with logic in fiction. Does this follow that? Do details unite cohesively? Do sentences move in concert with each other? Are these scenes connected both sequentially and causally and thematically? Does this story make sense?
Thirdly, while individual sentences and words combine to create an infrastructure of flow, most students are actually asking for feedback on pacing. When they ask about flow, they may be asking about action-to-dialogue-to-interiority ratio. Do these elements balance each other? Does the pacing drag? Is the description underserved with the action overblown? Are there sections bogged down with too much detail? Are scenes too thin, too gasbaggy, too writerly?
Lastly, as a reader, I experience flow when I forget I’m reading. I feel flow when I enter the narrative as if I’m experiencing it in real time even though, through the magical mystery of storytelling, time is compressed and whole lives are distilled into 5000 or so words. And yet, the story creates a reality in me that mimics a flow state. I am fully immersed in the world the writer has created for me.
When the story doesn’t “flow” well and there are a lot of bumps and holes, it’s the writer’s job to figure out how and where to diagnose those lapses. The key, I believe, is to give students some means by which they might diagnose their own flow issues prior to giving the piece to a feedback group. While I recognize the necessity of beta readers, my students often want to crowdsource their fiction to whomever in their feedback group has the most persuasive solution to a narrative problem that they, the writer, should be puzzling out on their own.
To that end, I’ve found that asking students to journal a bit around the idea of flow once they have a complete draft written is often very fruitful. The following four question sets are ones I use when students want to investigate their own ideas about “flow.”
What do you mean by “flow” with regard to your writing? How does flow create a pleasurable experience for the reader? How does a writer create flow?
From whose consciousness are the details being selected, noticed or described? Is this consciousness a consistent point of view that the reader is following? Are there spots where the consistency fails?
How does each scene relate to one another? Chronologically? Logically? Thematically? Are all the scenes necessary? If not, where could judicious cuts be made?
How does time work in the piece? Are we in the simple past or simple present? Is time consistent throughout? Are you taking the reader when you move forward or backward in time?