How To Write A Cohesive Story

To write a cohesive story, you need to envision your story as a whole and organize the events in order to get to your goal. Every story-line has a beginning, middle, and end. And every story-line has plots. The exposition is the beginning, next comes conflict or rising action, the middle should be climax, and finally the resolution and ending.

Within this story frame you need to organize your writing to go along with this structure. Many great storytellers envision their main story lines from beginning to end, and just go in and add more in between. With this way of writing you can ultimately keep focused on your goal.

There are other writers that start writing from the beginning and let their minds wander, they develop their story as they go along. Other writers have a specific moment in mind, perhaps the climax and write around it. Developing a story off one event.

There are also different outlines that are not just beginning, middle, and end. These can also become successful. You need to write how you would like to write and go from there, whatever inspires creativity and makes you feel passionate. There are so many ways to write and ultimately nobody out there is a perfect writer. Any way is fine, as long as you have a goal and work towards it.

Next, once you have the big picture down in any outline form, now make your individual writing cohesive. These are some easy ways to do that -

Stop run-on sentences
Take out overused words
Try and limit adverbs or crutch words
Make sure everything makes sense
Create linking relationships between characters
Extraordinary also means relatable
Add emphasis
Finnish Strong

There is nothing worse than a run on sentence that goes on and on and won’t ever end or ever give your reader time to stop and take a breath in between the time it takes to read it and is usually filled with useless information and or information that is too intricate and could have been summed up with simple words or with at least some bullet points. Just keep it simple.

Overused words

He said, she said, like, other, good, best, many, more, look, mad, sad, etc. This also goes for adverbs as well. Too many adverbs will take away from the story and leave it bland and boring. So keep it simple or you can make it intricate with adjectives but most importantly make it understandable.

A reasonable level of understandability is very important for your story, less if fiction, more if non-fiction, and more so for documentaries, memoirs, or stories based on Truth. Use words with certain definitions that you know will work well within your writing.

As far as linking relationships go, it will pull your reader in more if you have multidimensional characters that have layers, emotions, feelings, behind their motivations. A sense of past, present, and future. This will give your reader a foundation, a way to get connected with them through their past experiences and also give you a chance to foreshadow what might happen for the characters future by what they went through in their past. Linking these past, present, or future moments to other characters gives your reader a sense of how big your story really is. It adds much needed depth to your story as a whole.

When it comes to fiction some writers can go off the deep end with their imaginations and come up with something that is so totally out of this world that other people may have a hard time grasping. Although that’s great, there still has to be enough information to make the story somewhat relatable to your reader, otherwise your reader will either be lost or just bored with something they just can’t relate to.

For example there is an older Disney movie called Lilo and Stitch, of an alien looking dog with six retractable legs and weird looking spikes, that escapes prison from his former planet and gets stranded on Earth, Hawaii to be exact and befriends a small girl, pretending to be her lovable surfing dog all the while running away from his former planets secret service. See it’s very confusing and over the top, but it works, it works because there is enough relatability with the young girl and her dog and with her older sister, to progress the story further than just an alien running away from his home planet consistently. Some of the characters are just like us “human” and are going through normal human feelings and behaviors as well as the alien at times, and this relatability is what will capture enough of your readers attention to feel empathy for your characters in the story.

Adding emphasis basically means, read through your story and thesaurus it. If you have some adjectives that maybe you could change to add a little more flavor, then do it. Look up some of your word’s synonyms and see if anything might work better in its place. Add more descriptive words, show don’t tell. Paint a picture in your reader's head of what you are imagining.

And lastly finish strong. Make sure you have a strong ending. Nobody likes the infamous ending of, “and suddenly he woke up, and realized it was all a dream”. No please no, this is what elementary school kids do. It’s alright to add that somewhere in your story but don’t let that be the end all be all. Could you imagine if all the Harry Potter stories led up to a big finale of “he just woke up and realized it was all a dream”, what a let down that would be. So finish your story strong, with something that ties everything together from beginning to end. My beloved high school teacher used to call it circle stories, make a full circle, or circle back to something in the story to tie it all together. Your story certainly doesn’t have to end in a circle,, but as long as you create a memorable ending, one that gives your readers closure, then you will certainly have their hearts. Or you could always finish it with a big cliffhanger, and start writing your next book in your new series!