WTF: Flow, Part 1

1a. Flow

A good story will flow. If it’s executed well, you’ll get a long way into the book without even realising. You’ll turn the pages without noticing, you’ll slip from one paragraph to another with ease, and you won’t end up jarred by repetitive words, messy sentences, or exposition. All this and more is imperative to good flow.

1b. Repetition

Words aren’t there when we’re born. Sound is, so that means music is as well. The rhythm of the mother’s heart is the one true song the baby will hear until they’re born. After that, there’s an onslaught of sounds and, eventually, they become repetitive and familiar. This is important for learning a language. Mummy, Daddy, and the occasional swearword that goes viral.

To babies, it’s fun. It’s when learning is life and they do it with vigour. As we get older, that yearning for learning doesn’t so much dampen, but we do usually tackle it a little differently. Because of this, repetition can become annoying, especially if it’s obvious in our entertainment.

Books are great. They contain words. There are loads of words. Some of us collect them like Pokémon. You can even list them in generations, set into the decades for when you learned them, and how some words go in and out of fashion. Or is that just me? Either way, words are cool. Really cool. Like, cooler than cool. Right? Yeah...

Words rock until you use the same ones over, and over, and over…

What is repetition in writing? Well, look above. There's load of it. It’s not funny and it’s not clever. For someone reading a textbook it might work well, drilling the same thing into your head again and again. But for a reader chasing the plot, it’s annoying. It can also make the story sound messy. Here’s a few examples.

“I love this story. It’s a love story and it’s my favourite.”

This has been written in dialogue and you can’t trim dialogue down like you would when writing the narrative because dialogue must sound natural. This example is something someone is likely to say. But for the sake of this effort, we’re going to smarten it up.

“I prefer love stories, and this one is my favourite.”

Fewer words, no repetition, it flows, and it tells you what you need to know.

How else can repetition get in the way?

‘ I rolled out of bed and looked around my bedroom. ‘

Nothing wrong with that. Sure, bed is repeated, but they’re two different words, right? It may seem harmless, but to the reader, (especially overly critical ones like me) that makes a little notch in my mind, and those can soon add up - often subconsciously.

If we were to smarten this up, we could say

‘ I rolled out of bed and looked around the room.  ‘

Why does this work? Is room too vague? What happens if the reader thinks ‘well, sure they slipped out of bed, but maybe the bed’s not in a bedroom? Maybe it’s in a garage, or a hut, or the back of McDonalds?’

Well those readers have probably just moved on from Biff and Chip books so I don’t cater to those. But many readers are going to be smart enough to assume ‘there’s a bed in a room, so it must be a bedroom’. And if it’s not, you can go into detail of where it is when you build the scene. Don’t take the reader as a fool (but also don’t take them as a psychic, see ‘scene building’ for that)

This seems rather trivial, I suppose, and I might not care much about it, unless I notice is somewhere else, like this.

‘ We went fishing, and I caught several fish. ‘

True that, but you can expand on it a little to reduce the repetition and also add a bit of interest.

‘ We went fishing, and I caught several perch and a catfish. ‘

It adds more words, but it also improves the flow.

Or what about this?

‘ The body wasn’t laid right for someone who’d fallen backwards down the stairs. It was then we noticed something was under the body, something that couldn’t have been there before the body had fallen. ‘

How about we change it to

‘ The deceased victim wasn’t laid right for someone who’d fallen backwards down the stairs. It was then we noticed something was under the body, something that couldn’t have been there before the person had fallen. ‘

Why does this work better? I’ve not just hit right-click and surfed through synonyms, I’ve purposely chosen those different descriptions, here’s why.

The first I chose was ‘deceased victim’, one because this is typical crime novel speak, but it tells us the person is dead, it tells us the person is the victim and not the perp, and sets a mood. ‘Deceased victim’ sounds much more emotive than ‘body’. This has set the tone for the paragraph, one of initial shock which is what even the most hardened detective (but most importantly, the reader) would feel when viewing such a thing.

The second ‘body’ I didn’t change. It’s deadpan, it’s serious, almost clinical, because we’re getting stuck into it now. We’ve snapped into the mind of the detective, we’re looking at it like someone wanting to think with their head and not with their hearts, and they’re being objective.

But we’re all human. Even the jobbing officer who might’ve seen these scenes* a thousand times and grown cold, will succumb to their feelings. So, on the last change, I turned ‘body’ into ‘person’, denoting that this had once been a living, breathing member of the community, with a personality, and maybe even with a family and friends.

In closing, that’s probably a lot of intention I put into such a small paragraph. This might work well in a short scene, but I’d likely flesh this out over several paragraphs to help cement my meaning with the reader.

The lesson here is ‘avoid repetition’, but when changing the words, think about what word might need changing, what you're changing it with, or if you can you simply omit it all together.