This intrigues me.
Article in question: Go with the Flow
According to…umm…Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi–(I had to cut and paste his name, otherwise I’d be here all day) the best websites are those with a solid flow that takes you through an interactive experience from one page to another and get people involved with the content. This sense of rhythm, of expectation and chasing the information from one link to another is known as “flow.” As he puts it:
“A Web site that promotes flow is like a gourmet meal. You start off with the appetizers, move on to the salads and entrées, and build toward dessert. Unfortunately, most sites are built like a cafeteria. You pick whatever you want. That sounds good at first, but soon it doesn’t matter what you choose to do. Everything is bland and the same. Web site designers assume that the visitor already knows what to choose. That’s not true. People enter Web sites hoping to be led somewhere, hoping for a payoff.”
Now a number of us have websites, and so I recommend you read the article to gain a little insight in webbish philosophy, but I was wondering more along the lines of how this concept of flow could be applied to writing a story. You see a lot of words bandied about like “pace” and “climax.” How can we make our stories flow, speeding up the current of plot so it sucks the reader along, shunting them along the channels we want them to zip down, making them feel like they’re chasing down that last page until they arrive breathless at the end? Part of it, I think is providing an ever-present sense of danger and consequence. The moment danger is removed, or people start doing things without getting punished for it, you run the danger of losing the reader’s interest. Sure, they may be invested enough to keep going for another chapter or two, but even providing some mini-crisis or hot breath on the back of the neck can give the plot the push it needs to keep it alive. Flow requires motion, and more than just motion…momentum. You want that final downhill rush that makes the reader happy to get off the roller-coaster, but also wanting to get back on for another ride.
If only I could discover the all-powerful secret of prose that guaranteed me this every time I bashed my fists on the keyboard.
I also found this concluding statement to be a poignant reminder of how important it is that we engage a reader’s every sense throughout the story, not relying only on visual imagery.
“Realize that change and downtime are important. I found that if a painter relates to objects only through vision, his work is much less original than a painter who walks up to the object, smells it, throws it in the air, and manipulates it. The variety of sensory inputs allows you to create a visual image that has all kinds of dimensions bubbling up inside it. We are still a multimedia organism. If we want to push the envelope of complexity further, we have to use all of our devices for accessing information – not all of which are rational.”
And in the tradition of distracting you all with addicting internet games, I give you Flow, the browser game (though you can download it for play even when your connection is cut off).
Flow away, my friends. Don’t get eaten, while you’re at it.
I see that smile.