As the philosopher and writer Paul Valéry explained in 1938, “A poet’s function is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” That is, his job is to produce work.
— Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday
Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Your other jobs include fixing sentences, killing sentences, and arranging sentences.
If this is the case making, fixing, killing, arranging how can your writing possibly flow?
It can’t.
Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.
A writer may write painstakingly,
Assembling the work slowly, like a mosaic,
Fitting and refitting sentences and paragraphs over the years.
And yet to the reader the writing may seem to flow.
The reader’s experience of your prose has nothing to do with how hard or easy it was for you to make.
You’re not writing for a reader in the mirror whose psychological state reflects your own.
You have only your own working world to consider.
The reader reads in another world entirely.— Several Short Sentences about Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg
One is from my previous career as an electronic musician doing live shows: Every time the DJ drops a new track, it feels louder than anything else that you’ve heard before, which is actually not the case! What happens is you drop a new track, and then over the course of three to five minutes, you make it ever so slightly quieter. And then the new track comes in and it’s back at the level where the original one started, and then everything feels so loud.
So, that is one solution. The other one has something to do with my biggest hobby, cooking. With a ten-course meal, you start somewhere, and you a leave a palate behind in your mouth that wants to go to the next step. The same with wine tasting, where you start with a certain wine, and you build your way up to the bolder ones. That knowledge really comes into play when you want to create an arc over an action score with almost continuous music: In the first twenty minutes, you set a palate.—Tom Holkenborg (JunkieXL) (interviewed in Blood, Sweat & Chrome, Kyle Buchanan)
“Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things. Things aren’t difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state to make them.”
— Constantin Brancusi
This Builds Character 