Time & Perspective Quote by Arthur Christiansen

“Good stories flow like honey” is a working editor’s sensuous standard: prose as something you ingest, not admire from a distance. Christiansen, a newsroom lifer, isn’t praising prettiness; he’s praising frictionlessness. Honey is thick but obedient - it coats, it carries flavor, it goes down. That metaphor quietly rebukes a certain kind of literary self-importance: if the reader has to wrestle the sentence into meaning, the writer has shifted labor onto the audience.

The second line sharpens into bodily complaint. “Stick in the craw” turns a bad story into something indigestible, a lodged lump that triggers irritation. Christiansen’s subtext is about respect and power. Editors and journalists work under deadlines, on crowded pages, for readers with finite attention. In that ecosystem, clarity isn’t a virtue; it’s a survival trait. The reader is not a seminar participant. They’re a commuter.

His definition of “bad” is bracingly strict: “cannot be absorbed on the first time of reading.” Not “understood eventually,” not “rewarding on reread,” but absorbed. He’s privileging immediacy and coherence over ambiguity, ornament, or delayed payoff. That’s not an anti-intellectual stance so much as a statement of genre and purpose: journalism aims to move information and feeling efficiently through mass culture.

Context matters: Christiansen’s career spans the era when newspapers fought for speed, authority, and broad readership. This is a manifesto for the readable - a reminder that the highest craft can look effortless, and that effortlessness is rarely accidental.