Cohesion and Resonance! Cohesion and Resonance! Cohesion and Resonance!
So many pieces have to come together to create skillful fiction that it’s almost disingenuous to suggest there are only one or two that make or break the story. But turns out: it’s true. And if my marquee-style post title wasn’t enough to give it away, let me spell it out: for a story to work, it must possess… cohesion and resonance.
To some extent, I’ve been guilty of taking these two little guys for granted. It’s so easy to focus on the big guns—structure, character, theme—that you forget why any of it matters in the first place. But recently, I’ve realized that the two things that truly matter to me in fiction—the two things that make or break whether an otherwise well-written story not just works, but kicks everything up to the next level—are (you guessed it) cohesion and resonance.
Actually, I’ve always harped on the importance of cohesion and resonance. If you run a search, you’ll find that both are common words on this site. But they’ve always been background to whatever else I’m talking about—be it structure, characters, theme, or even POV.
However, of late, I find these two words frequently running through my head in response to some of the exciting big-name stories (both books and movies) that have ended up disappointing me. Mentally, I find myself doing a Barney Fife impression: They! have! to! be! shown!
So today, let’s talk cohesion and resonance. Let’s examine what each is, why they matter individually, how they work together, and how you can make sure your story isn’t missing out on these two incredibly vital and powerful magic ingredients.
What Is Cohesion?
Cohesion is logic. Cohesion is organization. Cohesion is cutting away the nonessential to find the essential.
Basically, cohesion is what happens when everything in a story is there for a reason. Every single part of the story is part of a united whole. It all pulls together, seamlessly, toward the same end goal.
Cohesion is not a hodge-podge of ideas thrown onto the page just because they’re all shiny and cool. Cohesion is what you get from a writer who has a specific vision for the story and who works with diligence and discipline to discover the story elements best optimized to support that vision and then pare away all the darlings that distract from it.
A few weeks ago, someone asked me to name some of my favorite movies. I started rattling off titles: Great Escape, Gladiator, Master and Commander, True Grit, Warrior, Black Hawk Down, Singin’ in the Rain, Secondhand Lions, Bourne Identity, It’s a Wonderful Life. I immediately realized the one thing all these stories have in common is a focused and cohesive plot. It’s so well done in these stories that you almost take it for granted. I certainly do. I don’t say, “Oh, I love The Great Escape because it’s so cohesive.” When I’m watching it, studying it, trying to figure out what makes it so powerful for me, I’m thinking more about technical stuff like plot and pacing, character and theme.
But here’s the thing: plot, pacing, character, and theme are founded on cohesion. You can have a story that does all those things—even does them well—but if it doesn’t bring them together in a cohesive way, the story as a whole will falter and fail.
Granted, it’s preferable to have pieces that are better than the whole, rather than pieces and whole that both stink. But how much better to have a story that is brilliant because its brilliant pieces came together into a single brilliant whole?
The Best Way to Create Cohesion
All right, so you’re sold: pass the cohesion. But where do you get it?
Cohesion is about all the pieces in your story coming together into a unified whole. But the single best place to start that coming-together is with your structure. If your story lacks cohesive structure, it will also lack the foundation upon which to execute the rest of your vision.
And, yeah, we’re back to the idea of vision. If you’re going to create a cohesive structure, you have to know what you want this story to be as a whole. It has to be more than just a random collection of dramatic events carefully timed to coincide with the structural beats.
Here are several points to keep in mind:
Structure is the backbone of your story.
If you don’t have a structure, you don’t have a story. You just have a bunch of stuff happening—and that’s if you’re lucky. I’ve seen far too many stories that offered lots of stuff happening but next to no progression in the plot. Structure is what keeps you on track and assures you’re creating a story rather than just action.
Structural events tell you what this story is about.
Structuring Your Novel Workbook
Anybody with a little education can structure a story. But you know you’ve found a masterfully structured story when you can pull all the major structural moments out of the narrative (as I do in the Story Structure Database) and see the common elements from plot point to plot point. Nothing is random. It all connects. One of my favorite examples is Martin Scorcese’s The Aviator—a sprawling and varied story that never loses sight of itself thanks to its structural underpinning in the throughline of Howard Hughes’s obsession with aviation.
Structural events need to form a continuous line of catalytic change.
Structure moves the plot. Plot points move the plot. That’s the whole point (!). But the only way you can know you’re moving the plot is if that plot is changing. If events don’t force characters to act and react and act again, always changing the story’s landscape, then the plot isn’t moving and the structure isn’t working.
The three most important moments for keeping your structure on track are the Inciting Event, the Midpoint, and the Climactic Moment.
Free E-Book: 5 Secrets of Story Structure
This isn’t to undermine the importance of other structural moments, obviously. But if you want to verify that your structure is cohesive—all its parts are telling the same story—the first place to look is at your Inciting Event (halfway through the First Act), your Midpoint (halfway through the Second Act), and the Climactic Moment (end of the Third Act). The Inciting Event and Climactic Moment, in particular, should bookend each other; the Inciting Event asks a question which the Climactic Moment directly answers. The Midpoint is the Moment of Truth in between that redirects the story from the character’s understanding of the question in the first half (in both the plot and the theme) and the character’s understanding of the answer in the second half.
When it comes right down to it, good structure is all about good foreshadowing: plants and pay-offs. The end is in the beginning—and if it is not, then the story isn’t cohesive.
What Is Resonance?
A story with cohesion is a story that is already far better than most. But cohesion is only half the magic. The other half is resonance.
Resonance is meaning. Resonance is what reader Eric Copenhaver called, in an email to me, “mythic value.” Resonance is what raises a story from interesting anecdote to universal affirmation.
You know that feeling you get when you connect with a story? That’s resonance. And that’s what we’re all looking for, as both readers and writers. Resonance is what lifts a story beyond mere entertainment into an experience of life itself.
Stories without resonance may be fun, but they’re quickly forgotten. This is true in any genre. Whether it’s a “big” epic journey or a “little” comedy sketch, it won’t matter to readers on any level unless it is a mirror reflecting a truth back at them.
Cohesion and resonance go hand in hand because they build one off the other. It’s hard (although not impossible) to get resonance out of a story that lacks cohesion. Cohesion is the ship in which resonance sails; if it’s leaky, the deeper meaning is going to get at least a little water-logged. And vice versa: if there’s no resonance helming your perfectly cohesive ship, best case scenario is that it just aimlessly wanders the seas.
Resonance is a little slippery, mostly because it’s also a little subjective. Although there are certainly universal truths we all resonate with, there are also specific stories or scenes that affect the individual in ways they do not affect the group. Still, it’s pretty easy to spot the stories that didn’t get it done in the resonance department: they’re soulless.
These are the stories you can just tell had little to no passion behind them. They’re stories that were churned out either to make money or just to fit a technically perfect structure (probably both). They’re stories that lack imagination, originality, empathy, and courage.
That said, it’s entirely possible to be imaginative, original, empathetic, and courageous—and still produce a story that lacks resonance, simply because it wasn’t executed well.
The Best Way to Create Resonance
Like cohesion, resonance only occurs when everything in the story comes together to support a singular vision. But as with cohesion and structure, there is an obvious entry point to checking and refining your story’s resonance.
The entry point to resonance is theme.
Great themes can arise from poorly-structured stories. Usually, this is simply the result of an author’s deep personal awareness and exceptional narrative skill. Few writers start out fully equipped with either. But the good news is that creating resonance via theme is something you can learn to do consciously and deliberately.
If cohesion is intellectual resonance, then resonance is emotional cohesion. Resonance is what you get when you’re able to purposefully shape plot and theme to create a unified feeling in your readers. Along the way, you’re likely to give them some interesting ideas to chew on, but even before their brains begin to process all that, they’re going have a sense, a feeling, that Yeeeeeeessss, this works. This is right. This is true.
If cohesion kickstarts with vision, then resonance kickstarts with honesty. You’ve created a smart and cohesive plot; now you write your guts out finding its honest core.
Here are a few pointers to keep in mind:
Theme is what your story is really about.
Resonant stories are those that use their plots to tell the story of the theme, rather than using the theme to simply embellish the plot. Think of plot as the extroversion of the theme. The plot provides the dramatic background that forces the characters to physically work through questions of universal truth. The theme and plot are integrally connected in that one always comments on the other. The plot is, in many ways, a metaphor for the theme, and theme is likewise a commentary on the plot.
Theme is the central existential question/answer that powers your plot.
A lot of people think “theme” is a one-word virtue or vice that sums up the essence of the story. Although you often can sum up a story’s theme in one word, it’s more instructive to think of theme as a question—and the plot as an externalized search for the answer. Try boiling your theme down to a central question (e.g., What is the cost of war? How do we overcome our pasts? Is idealism dangerous?). A complex story will never be as simple as just one question (indeed, ask a group of people to name the central theme in your favorite story and you’re likely to get many different—and probably accurate—suggestions). But that central question should be your guiding light in choosing cohesive plot elements every step of the way.
Theme brings plot and character together.
Writers often talk about “plot-driven fiction” vs. “character-driven fiction.” I would argue that truly resonant fiction is rarely either/or. This is because theme is the bridge between plot and character. The character’s arc explores the theme’s inner workings, while the character’s actions explore the theme’s external realities. When done well, plot, character, and theme come together powerfully in a cohesive and resonant whole.
Theme is not dogmatic.
It is impossible to write a truly resonant story if you believe you have all the answers. Because, face it, you don’t. (Sorry, keepin’ it real.) This is where the tough part of being honest comes into play. When you select your story’s central question, you must be willing to chase down all the possible answers. This doesn’t mean you have to believe them all. But it does mean you have to empathize with them enough to play devil’s advocate. You have to examine all aspects of your question with painful honesty. There’s a quote I like about how good fiction doesn’t offer answers, it just asks questions. This isn’t entirely true, since most stories will offer some kind of solution via the protagonist’s final choices. But if those final choices are going to ring true and give readers something worth thinking about, the journey to the end must be one of empathy.
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Okay, so I admit I’m writing this post for totally selfish reasons. I love cohesive and resonant fiction. I can’t get enough of it. I want more, more more. I want to write it, and I want you to write it so I can read it! In the midst of all your structuring, character building, and prose polishing, take a moment to check these two all-important ingredients of great fiction off your list. If you can create a story with cohesion and resonance, I guarantee you will have written something truly magical.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! Can you think of any other magic ingredients that take fiction from good to great? Tell me in the comments!
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