Flow. Someone please reveal to me this mystery!

I need to know...

what even is flow?

How do you get a word to drip and blend into the next?

There has to be some kind of technique.

It's always been a mystery to me.

My pipes are always clogged and stopped up.

Thoughts are strangled.

I stutter. I go on for too long.

How do you all do it?

Spoiler

@PenguinAttack, @Lumi, @Sachiko, @PrincessInk, @Willard, @Sonder, @LadySpark @spectator @hexglass
@Aley @nikayla @alliyah @Meshugenah

@everyone else who knows
@The struggle is real

I dunno about anyone else, but it boils down to rhythm for me - I tend to think more in musical terms than I mean to. So, basically, if the rhythm is off, I feel it more than anything, and that's what I listen for. I've been doing a similar exercise with the kids at work this week, reading two poems with completely different rhythms, and getting observations from them about how it sounds, what does it feel like, etc. Both flow within themselves quite nicely, but it's a bit jarring to hear them juxtaposed how I've been reading them, and i think it demonstrates rather nicely how I think of flow.

It's something internal to each poem, reliant upon rhythmic structure.


(no, seriously. I've done this before when I hate something I've written, and probably 80% of the time it's related to the rhythm of the words. The other 20 is made up of word choice, hating an image, and generally being cranky with myself)

Same here, it's all about stresses in a poem.

If you're looking at a poem that flows really well, it combines internal rhyme, alliteration, and meter usually.

If you have a balance of stressed/unstressed syllables, you tend to be better off with flow than if you have all stressed or all unstressed.

When doing a line break, try not to start the next line with a stressed beat if you end with a stressed beat, it makes the reader pause before they start the next line necessarily.

Cool I definitely see how flow has this musical aspect to it, it makes sense that rhythm and by that token syllabic stresses should contribute to a work's overall flow.

I find it interesting how in one poem you can write something like

Mother passes presents today

And in a different poem:

Present day: mother passes

And you have the same words but a different flow, a different rhythmn, meter, syntax, meaning. And to Aley's point, just the word 'present' alone is said aloud with different stresses depending on how in the sentence it is used!

What do you guys think of this F-word (meaning flow c: article?

To summarize, the writer seems to equate flow with syntax more than meter.

Though meter and syntax are closely tied, the writer proposes that what gives a piece its oomph, its flow, its sense of mastery come moreso out of sentence variation. The more varied your sentences, the better the flow. What do you guys think? Can improving one's flow be a simple matter of just flipping your words around?

Me personally, I like how this applies to all kinds of writing from poetry to prose to essays and is something practicable. Especially Mesh, since you mentioned word order being 80% of your frustrations. Interesting, no?

What an interesting discussion! I'm not sure so could be totally wrong, but I tend to agree with the article (which I skimmed over but admittedly didn't read in full). Although I think that "flow" can refer or be a result of both sentence syntax and meter. When writing poetry, I get really bogged down if I try to think of the meter (as in counting out & find stressed syllables) of the different lines, but creating a phrase or line that has "natural" or "pleasing" syntax seems to be less head-work?

Another interesting aspect of the discussion is when poets sometimes purposely slow down the pace of their poem by creating clunky/badly flowing lines to mirror the content of the piece somehow. When I think of flow I guess I generally think pace also has a role in it as well as where the line breaks happen. For instance in what you posted above I think the flow is easily improved with line breaks between phrases. Although some word combinations make for choppy flow no matter what you do. Like "Kind of" and "it's always".

"How do you get
a word to drip
and blend into the next?
There has to be
some kind of technique.
It's always been A mystery to me."

Yeah... I don't know. Flow in poetry is a somewhat of a mystery, you can tell when a poem has good flow, but I'm not sure I can explain very easily how it happens.

Flow to me is a combination of what @Meshugenah and @Aley have already explained, but at the same time, it's the way the poem reads. When I read a poem aloud, I often want it to read smoothly rather than being clunky. Flow often depends on meter and rhythm. Rhythm, for the most part, is what I find flow to be, if I had to use a synonym.

I often question or critique flow in the reviews I do, pointing out if something sounds clunky, and a lot of the time, the line only needs a rearrangement of words. I agree with Mesh in that a lot of the time when I dislike a piece (of others and of my own), it has something to do with its flow.

Well I think what you're seeing in the article is actually just the difference between how poetry handles meter and stress, and how novels/short stories handle meter and stress. I actually talked about that in an article I wrote for TKB a little while ago.

The information I collected for that article came from both searching "stress" as a term to double check, and personal knowledge from working with different types of writers. Poets use stress/flow differently than writers and I do think that stress and flow are very close. Stresses in Writing <-- here's the part where I start talking about the differences.

I do think that poets and novelists have some problems actually talking about what they are using in day to day writing however, and it's probably the same for all skills crafts. I mean, you ask a painter who you really love about color theory and they usually will just say "I just did it" unless they went through formal training. These skills are not school exclusive. You don't need to be coached to get good, so a lot of the time people don't go out of their way to look up what they're doing, and why even if they can recognize what is good and bad.

@Willard always says my flow is weird <3

I just follow the pattern of my thoughts.

I also listen to a lot of music and I like to take influence from the melodies and beats.

Aley wrote:Same here, it's all about stresses in a poem.

If you're looking at a poem that flows really well, it combines internal rhyme, alliteration, and meter usually.

If you have a balance of stressed/unstressed syllables, you tend to be better off with flow than if you have all stressed or all unstressed.

When doing a line break, try not to start the next line with a stressed beat if you end with a stressed beat, it makes the reader pause before they start the next line necessarily.

Shakespearean Sonnets tend to require a stressed ending on each line but ths can be offset via enjambment. Making the thought continue into the next and the next lines.