The first one – the by-design one – is Joseph Heller's Catch-22. It's a sin to use adjectives, if I've read Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft correctly, but Catch-22 fires them off like a machine gun to great effect because they all serve the greater cause of creating cohesiveness, of making the characters appear and act in a way that's consistent with the natural laws that govern the world of Catch-22. Nothing in the novel can escape from these laws, and the reader can therefore invest emotionally in this story with confidence. The story throws you down the rabbit hole and into the world of Catch-22, and while in Wonderland rest assured you won't find a Starbucks because if you do, that would be incongruous with that world's natural laws, it would be a pinprick that makes you go "huh?" and wake you up from your dream, from the illusion.
The second example is the Guns N' Roses song Paradise City. Now, stay with me here. The song is from the album Appetite for Destruction, a truthful if not gritty account on sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Play the album and you can hear, see, and smell the streets of LA. It's a cohesive world that it's created and therefore safe for you to invest in emotionally. The song Paradise City, however, is our pinprick. But, like the album, it too is cohesive (and therefore a world within a world in the album's context). From the jangly guitar intro to the innocent lyrics, the whole thing operates according to its own natural laws and forms a cohesive world because… it rings true. The band was telling a truth. The song was conceived in the back of a van when the band, still unknown at the time, was traveling back home to LA from a brotherhood-forging road trip. They were feeling triumphant and out came this song.
Which tells me something else. One of the ingredients to creating a cohesive universe, no matter how outlandish, is truth. You have got to tell the truth, a truth or several truths. Star Wars is the perfect world-building success story. It's a universe that operates according to its own natural laws, and because it's so successful and popular people must have gotten some truths out of it, even if they were there by chance.
Anyway, to round this off, for something to be enjoyed on an artistic level it has got to be cohesive, meaning it has got to operate and abide by its own set of natural laws. Why? Because that's how we, humans, perceive and experience our existence in the here-and-now and if this is reflected in that something it tells us that it is being truthful. The currency of art is after all Truth.
