As someone who has been a devoted reader since a very young age, as well as a reviewer and author of fiction, story flow is something I've learned to feel intuitively without properly considering its defining nature. I'm not convinced it's simply another name for pacing. Perhaps a better way to describe it is a "momentum of attention. Momentum of Attention In physics, we learn that momentum is mass times velocity—you could think of it as the "staying power" behind something

When a story is boring and confusing, the problem is often its inciting incident.