How to Use Logic to Make Scattered Stories More Cohesive
Picking up the pieces strewn about when writing with a scatterbrain
“This is atrocious,” I said to myself, after typing up an article with a fervor. I felt accomplished. I felt like I’d just churned out another banger. All of this, of course, until I read it. Then I realized I was staring at a steaming pile of hot garbage. “This doesn’t make much sense,” I thought silently to myself, as I bowed my head in shame. We all know this process. If you’ve been a writer long enough, it’s happened to you a time or two.
You write a great piece, there’s a lot of excellent meat-and-potatoes substance in the piece, but it’s so incoherent that you’ll lose a lot of your readers by publishing it.
Readers often report that one of the main reasons they abandon an article is that the piece isn’t getting to the point. They feel like they’re being led down a path that’s confusing and uncertain and would rather find something more cohesive. Readers don’t like empty words that go nowhere.
If you’re anything like me, you might file it away for a rainy day, a draft that you can touch up later. But if you’re like me, you also know that sometimes those days never come. Your article has been sentenced to life in the prison of your drafts folder.
Fortunately, there are a few tricks you can employ to makes sure that these pieces end up becoming brilliant published works of yours. Let’s start with some of the basic tricks that can be done in this situation to produce your masterpiece.
One thing you can do is sleep on it. Sometimes, you’re just in a writing mood and not in an editing mood. And if this is the case, you’ll do a lot better coming back to it with fresh eyes and a good night’s sleep.
Another trick I sometimes do is wipe the slate completely. I open up a new text document and copy-paste my draft onto a file where I keep my notes. I open another blank text file and then I can copy and paste each section, bit by bit, into the blank draft. This disassemble and reassemble technique can sometimes salvage a piece. But what happens when it doesn’t?
That’s when I turn to logic.
