How do I make an essay flow well?
I was asked to answer this question on the website Quora.com
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Each of us has our own flow. Each of us is a river. The way you shape words into a flow will depend on whether you have a Mississippi or D River (the shortest river in the world at 440 feet). The essay is a metamorphic form. It is, as Montagne who first used the word, said, an "attempt" to place words into order, to make them flow, but beyond that there are no formulas.
But I just led you up the river. There are formulas everywhere about essays. These are neither secret nor do they lead to alchemical transmutation of neural impulses into golden prose. I have just stolen this trope and writer's words are always stolen. We honor ourselves among such thieves and thieving. We need to steal and then sort, need to trade with those on distant shores, with those natives who know the land and the names and most of all the myths and traditions. We need to do a Lewis and Clark and come back loaded with things that did not have names in our language before.
Some essays attempt Class VI rapids and fall apart, sink swiftly as the Pequod. Some topics are white whales; others, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcons; others yet, tigers burning bright. Those who are novices should paddle slowly, enjoy the views of class I. Simply put is not so simple sometimes.
An essay can and should have ebbs and flows, should have, somewhere, a bend and then something surprising either in image, structure, or diction. Or it should meander and then find shoals, suffer through a broken oar or two. If you wish to write an academic essay then follow the fish swimming together. If you wish to write creative non-fiction pick your guides, those who have survived to tell the tale. Ancient Mariners who share their nouns and verbs. Don’t forget your life vest, that snug tug of stuff that keeps you afloat even as you fall from safety. The flow can lead to temptation or lead to Lethe’s forgetfulness. It can lead and you can follow the prose if you know how to trust the Muses. An essay never is but always becomes and begets. Names and facts and dates sometimes. Acts and strutting players on a stage signifying the nothing that is the song of ourselves or the nothing that is and the nothing that isn’t. As with Huck and Jim, you should light out for the territories on your raft. You might find freedom. You might find serfdom. You might find surf and sand as the river empties into the sea, the “deluging onwardness” of worlds and words.
Note: this essay is 440 words
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“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“Life is like the river, sometimes it sweeps you gently along and sometimes the rapids come out of nowhere.”
― Emma Smith
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
“One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.”
― Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
“Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once -somewhere- far away in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
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