Writing a piece, no matter how large, is artful. There is little point in creating fifty or so nice sentences, throwing them into the air, and pinning them where they land. Discouraging throwing does not mean discouraging risk nor originality. What one should focus on is flow. Imagine a motley crew flying through some tormenting white rapids. Each point in which the boat goes along the rapids is somewhat planned and there is a clear goal: to get through the rapids with all the passengers about a boat. But within the rapids it is utter chaos. The only sanctuary is continuity in the laws of physics; where the boat is at one timestep must be from another position plus some infintesimal change in the boat position. A large number of these timesteps in sequence is a flow. So as I flow (possibly in chaos and wet screams), each step I take is linked to where I was before.

Now map this image to when you read a passage in a book. You start by reading the first sentence of the paragraph or page, or wherever you are, then the second, and you note that information in the previous sentence builds on what was said before - like a moving on a path through rapids. The sun cast flittering shadows on the water. When this rule is broken it is a knife in the chest of the unwitting reader. Even though, two sentences ago, I addressed water which is in the context of the rapids analogy, the sentence did not directly link to the one before it. Like those adorable chains of children waddling along on a fieldtrip, where each child clings to a common rope. There is order: each child follows a previous child. There is balance: each child tugs with equal force and no child is yanked over. Yet, there is chaos: the line of children are awkwardly out of ryhthm, and each child is of varying size and complextion. With ingenuity, a few well-chained sentences become a single entity, just like a group of children is called a class. Naturally creating these entities in one’s writing through slacking or tightening the sentence connections is one of the skills that can distinguish a memorable piece from a mess.

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The graphic at the top of this post: “A Drawing of A River by Leonardo Da Vinci” via VQGAN+CLIP.