South Park writers Matt Parker and Trey Stone recently shared their story-writing advice, in simplified form, which provides a valuable mechanism for ensuring cohesion in your story. 

The basic approach, as outlined by Parker and Stone, is this:

When you have a set of story beats or scenes, you can ensure that they’re interconnected, and helping to build your story, by imagining the terms ‘but’ or ‘therefore’ between them. If the story makes sense, ‘but’ or ‘therefore’ will be the logical connectors, ensuring that there’s a logical sequence to your narrative, as opposed to ‘and then,’ which could indicate a disconnect, in that the scenes don’t necessarily relate to one another.

Essentially, this means that the story is evolving based on what’s come before it, and what the audience already knows, as opposed to you injecting disconnected or subsidiary elements.

So, let’s take Star Wars, for example. In “A New Hope,” the connection between the opening scenes would be:

‘Darth Vader attacks Rebel ship’

Therefore

‘Princess Leila puts the message to Obi Wan in R2 and sends him off to an escape pod’

Therefore

‘The robots end up on Tattooine’

But

‘That’s also where Luke Skywalker lives’

So you’re connecting the story in logical sequence, as opposed to ‘and then’ which is not necessarily consequential of the preceding element.

An example of an ‘and then’ here might be a cut between these scenes to Han Solo and Chewbacca running a smuggling job. It’s possible that this may be another story element of note, but it wouldn’t build upon what’s come before it, and might therefore feel disjointed and out of place.

The approach helps to ensure that your story gathers momentum based on each event, as opposed to losing focus through side-stories or unrelated narratives.

The concept reminded me of Gordon Lish’s writing advice, which is more specific to writing structure than scene building, but follows the same line of thinking.

Lish is a renowned editor, who reportedly made many of Raymond Carver’s stories what they were through his meticulous approach to sentences, and merciless editing. Lish was also a longtime writing teacher, and has helped many authors refine their literary voice.

And as noted, Lish’s approach to the fiction writing process bears similar notes to the South Park writers’ notes.

As summarized by Christine Schutt, an author who’s worked with Lish:

“Each sentence is extruded from the previous sentence; look behind when you are writing, not ahead. Your obligation is to know your objects and to steadily, inexorably darken and deepen them. Query the preceding sentence for what might most profitably be used in composing the next sentence. The sentence that follows is always in response to the sentence that came before.”

Lish also taught repetition and the recalling of details and objects to color your stories, with the first sentence of your work acting as an ‘attack sentence.’

“Your attack sentence is a provoking sentence. You follow it with a series of provoking sentences.” 

The idea is that this builds the story block by block, engaging the reader by expanding on the theme with more and more exploratory sentences.

The sequencing of such is similar to using the ‘therefore’ and ‘but’ approach to keep things tethered to your main concept, though Lish’s notes are more stylistic and designed to help in your actual communication of your story.

But there’s a linkage there, which could help to keep your writing compelling and accumulating over time, driving readers towards your peaks.

(Note: Another of Lish’s writing tips I like is ‘stay on the body,’ and don’t go below the surface of your objects, seeking to explain their inner truths. Lish’s view is that you should rely on your descriptions to guide emotional response in your readers, and giving away too much in blatant exposition on this front will blunt your writing.)

To be clear, there’s no foolproof strategy to creative writing, but both concepts provide some additional food for thought as to how you might go about creating more compelling, engaging work.