The best writers have a rhythm. It makes reading easy. My writing started with making up speeches. I can’t say I take that much trouble on Medium but if you want 10,000 to read your story then you need to polish up the flow.
Read it all out to an audience, an imaginary audience is fine.
Writing poetry is a good discipline. Think like a rapper. You can see that the paragraph above has a structure. Writing a whole story in short tight sentences would drive any reader mad but my first sentence says “This is a writer that doesn’t mess about”. And now the second paragraph has the same pattern and the reader is hooked into the flow and wants an intricate development to unfold.
Think of a symphony, how it starts. A simple idea, a small stumble forward asking the listener “What next?”, then the genius flowing. If you can write a story where the sound and rhythm of the words can carry the listener on its own then you are halfway there.
When you make a speech to the back of the room you need short phrases that can be bellowed loud enough to make heads turn.
Listen to Donald Trump. He breaks all the rules and I am hoping you do not like what he has to say. But you cannot fail to know exactly what he means.
A talker in the background as I write just said,
“The winner will be decided,
Random
Ina draw”
Medium won’t let me space the gaps but the talker is shortening down for effect. Somehow random works better than randomly in heightening the tension. Vaguely in our subconscious, the effect works.
The moral is that polishing is all about flow.
