Information Flow

Leah
5 min readDec 23, 2021

More Writing Technique

People who are familiar with my first drafts might be perplexed that I would try to write something about information flow when it comes to fiction. I do not always get information flow correct. I frequently will write a description out of order, starting with the last piece first then writing the first piece, then the middle. Then I’ll have to reorder them.

However, I think a lot about information flow in fiction, as well as the different types of information flow, particularly since I’m not the best at it.

Since I had knee replacement surgery, I’ve had some difficulty getting back to writing full time. Part of that is also due to this summer, during all the construction and moving, I wasn’t writing as much. This meant I was out of practice before I had surgery, and major invasive surgery has taken much longer for me to recover from than I expected.

This also means that some of the tricks I’d taught myself for writing are no longer automatic. Like information flow.

What exactly am I talking about when I say “information flow?” This phrase is used to describe more than one thing in terms of writing.

There’s the basic “what a character sees” sort of flow. Then there’s how you present information to the reader, answering their questions as they come up. The last type…

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Leah

Leah Cutter sold her first short story back in 1997, and continues to write and sell both her fiction and non-fiction. She supports herself with her writing.