Make the Words Flow

Now that we have a very rough story with all the sections following in a logical order, we need to make sure each section and/or paragraph links properly so that the piece flows. Before we do that though, look again at your material and pick the strongest, most interesting sentence or paragraph, and move it to the top of your story.

A reader will give you the first sentence to hook them in, sometimes two, but work with the idea that if you haven’t got them in the first sentence, you’re going to lose them altogether.  That’s why you need to put your strongest, most eye-catching sentence up front.  You want them to want to read more.

Putting your strongest sentence or paragraph up front, may mean that your logical order is compromised, but you can easily fix that.  Go right through your story and begin linking paragraphs.  Instead of leaving a reader dangling at the end of a paragraph by suddenly jumping into a new topic without any warning, help the reader over by providing a transition.

Transitions are best made by referencing one paragraph back to the other. For instance:

You will get better at this the more often you do it, so don’t worry if it seems like a jumble now. Just put all pieces relating to each other together and organise each section, one behind the other in what seems to you to be a reasonable order. At this stage, all you’re looking for is flow…does each section of your story follow naturally from one to the other?

What we’re looking for when we look for flow is a beginning, a middle, and an end. We are not yet looking for a finely edited piece of work. More than the writing itself, we’re looking for the ideas to flow and follow naturally, and to start somewhere and end somewhere in a logical progression…

Notice the reference to the discussion on flow in the second paragraph? Good transitions will make a series of disconnected ideas work together into a story-line.  So go ahead, connect your story up so that it reads smoothly, and we’ll do the fine editing next time.