The Causal Chain And Why Your Story Needs It

The most obnoxious thing my writing teacher taught me every story needed, that I absolutely loathed studying in the moment and that only later, after months of resisting and fighting realized she was right, was something called the causal chain.

Simply put, the causal chain is the linked cause-and-effect that must logically connect every event, reaction, and beat that takes place in your story to the ones before and after.

The Causal Chain is exhausting to go through. It is infuriating when someone points out that an event or a character beat comes out of nowhere, unmoored from events around it.

It is profoundly necessary to learn and include because a cause-and-effect chain is what allows readers to follow your story logically which means they can start anticipating what happens next, which is what is required for a writer to be able to build suspense and cognitively engage the audience, to surprise them, and to not infuriate them with random coincidences that hurt or help the characters in order to clumsily advance the author's goals.

By all means, write your story as you want to write it in the first draft, and don't worry about this principle too much. This is an editing tool, not a first draft tool. But one of the first things you should do when retroactively begin preparing your story to be read by others is going step by step through each event and confirming that a previous event leads to it and that subsequent events are impacted by it on the page.

When your character is standing knee-deep in literal or metaphorical shit with a weapon in one hand and their last hope of surviving evaporating around them, and they’re wondering how their simple smuggling job/adulthood ritual/simple morning in an ordinary village led to ALL OF THIS, both they and the reader need to be able to backtrack through every single choice, mishap, attempt at fixing earlier problems and panicky flight or fib led them unerringly to this moment. That chain cannot have breaks in it, or you lose the whole impact. 

– Heidi Pitlor

Leaving Holes

Your story is 50% reader. It’s that mixture of reader and writer that makes the magic. Which means your story needs to have holes for the reader to fill in. You need that negative space for the puzzle pieces to fit. I’m not talking about plot holes, I’m talking about giving one sentence the power of two. A book that means what it says is a mediocre book. A book that means more than what it says is a great book. Don’t over-develop your characters, having them analyze every feeling, or spelling out what every character in a scene is thinking. Don’t follow up a powerful line with an explanation with what makes that line powerful. Let your words imply as much as they state.

Balzac, Dumas and Hugo had their differences. but they all share the common basic belief that introducing their mysterious protagonist through their most recent disguise is a hell of a power move

Umberto Eco once wrote "I Am Edmond Dantès!", an essay on the literary device of recognition (or anagnorisis, if we wanna get fancy: "when a character unexpectedly discovers (by another person’s revealing it, or by discovering a necklace or a scar) that someone else is his father or son or worse still, as when Oedipus realizes that Jocasta, the woman he has married, is his mother") in French serialised novels, aka feuilletons.

Feuilletons kinda went overboard with this. Everyone did it at least once, and Monte Christo dramatically reveals himself like a hundred times. And at least in this case it works, it's still satisfying, but in other, less famous feuilletons, the repetition kills the drama, you got dozens of characters recognised as someone else in the same novel, and it's redundant and pointless.

He gives one exceptionally silly example (Ponson du Terrail’s Le forgeron de la Cour-Dieu, never heard of it) where the recognitions in the story go like this:

…and it goes on like this for a whole page, it's hilarious.

Relevant to the OP, he also says, "A useful element for the successful outcome of an anagnorisis is disguise: by removing his mask, the person disguised increases the other characters’ surprise; and the reader either shares that surprise or, having seen through the disguise, enjoys the surprise of the unsuspecting characters."

And he ends the essay by stitching together in a single 6-page paragraph a whole mess of recognition scenes from the genre, from Dantès and Valjean to completely unknown (hah!) characters, it's a torrent of ridiculousness, I love it.

(essay found in Umberto Eco, Inventing the Enemy and Other Occasional Writings)

“As a child I paid very little attention to authors’ names; they were irrelevant; I did not believe in authors. To be perfectly candid, this is still true. I do not believe in authors. A book exists, it’s there. The author isn’t there — some grown-up you never met — may even be dead. The book is what is real. You read it, you and it form a relationship, perhaps a trivial one, perhaps a deep and lasting one. As you read it word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and reread, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul. Where, in all this, does the author come in? Like the God of the eighteenth-century deists, only at the beginning. Long ago, before you and the book met each other. The author’s work is done, complete; the ongoing work, the present act of creation, is a collaboration by the words that stand on the page and the eyes that read them.”

- Ursula K. Le Guin, from “Books Remembered,” Children’s Book Council Calendar xxxvi:2 (November 1977)

I’m no longer satisfied by the explanation that there is no correlation between great art and great pain. I think that Vincent Van Gogh deserved to feel better and to be happy, and I think that he would have gone on to create many more beautiful paintings. But I take comfort in the idea that his art was about survival, that every beautiful thing he created was an affirmative commentary on the question, “Why live?”

The world hurts so goddamn much and I am so sorry. I don’t think pain makes artists great and I think that great artists got that way because they worked for it, but when I say that I mean they wrestled for the things they bring to light in their art, grabbing on tight to the miraculousness of light and sunflowers and living like they were drowning, because they were. And I mean that Van Gogh’s paintings all feel like they’re trying to save my life. This is beautiful, and it’s important. Beauty is important. Life is important. Light is important, and irises are important, and the color yellow is important, are you listening to me?

Pain doesn’t make artists great, but I think great art is always trying to respond to the question how can we stay alive? I think that’s an important distinction.

Depression will rot your soul in a way that will make you forget what beauty is and how to see it. When I was 17, I made a list of reasons to live, and it was like wading through deep mud. It fought me with every step. That heavy, aching numbness. It felt exhausting to write them down. Fireflies. The kindness of strangers. Libraries. Small birds. And if you understand the feeling I describe, you know that if you want to survive, you must become someone who sharply experiences the goodness of life. You have to dig your fingernails into it and drag it out of its hiding places around you.

This is about survival. Like when I say that this is great art, I mean that you can tell that there is something that is so so so important here, and that important thing is something like look, existence is beautiful. I can wish that Van Gogh had a chance to live a much longer, happier life, and at the same time be...cognizant? grateful? that his work doesn’t communicate Today I will paint cypresses but instead Today the world is beautiful, and I will live in it, and I will show you.

I don’t know how I got on this topic or why I’m so emotional. I can’t even tell most of the people that have saved my life; they are long gone. Thank you. For showing me.

#SPEAKING OF EL BEING ENOBY #there's a lot of value in reading the Scholomance books as a dialogue #not with Harry Potter but with the Harry Potter *fandom* #including El being half-Indian and Orion being Nice Himbo Draco Malfoy #and taking the unexamined colonialism/british supremacy that underpins JKR's work #to its logical conclusion

#and then writing a whole trilogy as a critique of it #these books read to me as a response to the FANDOM response to JKR's shoddy worldbuilding and it is FASCINATING to me #like down to the choice of Some Dude From Manchester calling it the SCHOLOMANCE #which is a loaded as hell folkloric name

#and Wizard London actually having a response to WWII #a lot of which was 'keep calm and commit atrocities while yeeting eldritch abominations to India to make them THEIR problem' but like #it actually feels like the wizards interact with the world

#SPEAKING OF I'm still not over the Secret Wizard Councils Facebook Group (via @thepioden)

i mean, given how thoroughly Orion is reduced to his role as The Hero and what an important element of the story that is, i'd argue he's at least as much an engagement with fandom's Harry Potter as he is fandom's Draco Malfoy.

(though i wouldn't be surprised to learn that if you'd read Cassandra Claire's notoriously plagiarism-riddled early work you'd see allusions to the trendsetting Draco In Leather Pants lmao)

but iirc Enoby recruits both characters to her whatever is going on in My Immortal and harry changes his name to Vampire to be more goff so an amalgam makes. sense. as;lkdfsj;kldfklj

sidebar you know i love how Orion is just swanning around with silver Main Character Hair and it is so deliberately never called out as bizarre by any character, despite no one else in the whole setting having unusual coloring.

silver's a great choice, because it doesn't require any pigments or anything; it's a hair color human bodies do produce naturally. but not usually teenage ones. so is this in fact a sign of how his body has been under profound unnatural stress for its entire existence? who knows. not gonna even look at it.

but i think yeah, scholomance is definitely engaging with Harry Potter both as deliberately (and often thoughtlessly) constructed literary work and as cultural presence, which includes a lot of what people have done in reply to the fuckery and lacunae in the source text.

one thing i kept noticing without having any particular takeaway on it was the contrast between the handing of Hogwarts-the-setting as essentially a character in its own right which is implied to have some form of will and take 'sides,' but which ultimately does not possess agency and is not engaged with as a conscious entity ever

and the scholomance, which is understood to be not a person, but absolutely aware enough to be malevolent. and then further understood to be not truly malevolent but an utterly amoral, inhuman thing compelled by its design to maximize student survival rate at any cost--no justice, no goodness, only the cold numbers. the social-darwinist numbers rigged from the start to favor the children of its creators, and to eat the others alive to power its mission.

and then it throws itself on the pyre just as wholeheartedly as it did all those children, when the numbers say that's how to win the numbers game.

(and then they go back and save it.)

and like. it's great as an approach to the whole genre deal of magical school, where there's always a struggle in writing between the individuality of the people who make up the faculty etc and their function as part of the institution--that is, to do that justice you often need to take wayyyyy too much page time off the students. so this is a clever efficiency, in the way it contracts all the systemic injustice of a society into one inhuman entity. shaped by human will and prejudice, but not requiring you to directly engage with human individuals; a sort of social thought-experiment.

but i feel like there's an interaction with the textual handling of hogwarts specifically that i can't quite pin down.

anyway i think one of the interesting points of rebuke is that even when the power of friendship and purity of intent and so forth do n fact save the day. the text scrupulously avoids positioning survival in itself as a rhetorical victory.

winning doesn't mean you were right, it just means you were strong or lucky or clever. that's true at the beginning and it's still true at the end. do not endorse the idea that having something is proof you deserve it more than people who don't.

earlier today i told an acquaintance in passing that i'll often be in the middle of a novel and think "man i wish this shit were more ambiguous" and had to reiterate twice that i wasn't being sarcastic before they believed me, so this post is to say: i love when writers don't bother to explain everything, i love when stories end uncertain and unsettling, i love being required to think as a reader, i love when stuff makes no damn sense, no i'm not kidding

im so tired of the PSAification of fiction by people who genuinely think that every single story but especially theirs has to be a parable. im not here for a puppet show. im here to see weird people have terrible problems in a place i’ve never been before. sure it would be nice if love saved them! but it would be extremely fun if love made everything worse!!!

Ok but before you go throwing random stuff into your story to spice it up or get it un-stuck, consider doing the following:

Point is, the deeper the connections between your story elements, the more satisfying the read. You don’t have to view those connections as a constraint. They can tell you what needs to happen next.

- from helen cooper’s introduction to Le Morte D’Arthur

imo an impulse to psychologise characters produces a lot of bad writing and bad reading practices, because so much of psychological common sense is basically just pathologising. so i really love this and it reflects what i enjoy about malory so much, the kind of attention elicited by allowing a character to speak for themselves, to enact a conflict rather than simply telling me there is one.

From Practicing Mediocrity

to clarify about fan fiction

to clarify something chuck said in post about being PRO FAN FICTION, some buds have asked if i misspoke when i said ‘fan fiction is part of the original art’. i did not misspeak. i really truly believe this.

if i write a story and you read it an this moves you to paint a picture of snabe and harriet porber, that WHOLE EXPERIENCE FROM ME TO YOU is its own mixed media piece. the medium is motion (getting up and getting the paints) visual (painting) literary (reading the book in first place and then writing your own commentary when you post about it later). it is drama and performance. it is meditation. it is dance in its own way.

i very much mean this: art does not begin and end on the canvas or the page. it is what you had for breakfast the morning you wrote those words, or the story that stuck in your head after watching a show the night before. art is the buckaroo who was moved to pen a whole five page romance story about your characters having a kind picnic in the part.

we are here to create as we push back against the blank empty void, and we prove love is real every time we fill this blank space with little pieces of us. i will not stand in the way of that, and it is an honor to fill this space with this web of inspiration from one bud to the next. ALL OF THIS TIMELINE is a piece and we are one big writers room. there is no shame in this and it is a group project i am proud to be a part of.

25 THINGS I’VE LEARNED IN 25 YEARS IN TV WRITING

Well, it’s actually been 30 years now, but here’s a spew I did 5 years ago on the bird app to commemorate my 25 years as a TV writer. 

I’ve edited it a bit for clarity. Hopefully some of you will find it useful.

1. In TV writing (and writing in general) there is only one unbreakable rule: Thou shalt not be boring.

2. Write characters people want to hang out with for an hour or so once a week for years to come. Even if they’re bad people, make them interesting, engaging bad people.

3. If your lead is a bad person, make them funny and/or sexy. Direct most of their bad behavior toward other bad people or themselves. Make them well motivated. Maintain rooting interest.

4. What makes a character special should be intertwined with what makes them struggle. Perfect people are boring.

5. Characters should complement/conflict with each other. No two characters should serve the same purpose/have the same backstory/have the same voice.

6. Cast the best actor, adjust the character to suit.

7. Give your leads the best lines/moments. No one is tuning in to watch the funny guest star. Like Garry Marshall said back on HAPPY DAYS, “I’m paying Henry Winkler $25,000 an episode. Give the Fonz the jokes.”

8. Your characters, good & bad, should reflect the reality of our wonderful, diverse world. White male shouldn’t be the default.

9. Avoid stereotypes. Stereotypes are boring.

10. If all your POV characters know some secret, the audience should know it too.

11. If your show hinges on a big mystery, know more or less what the truth is from the beginning. You can change it later if you need to, but write to a specific.

12. If your story doesn’t test your characters mentally, physically, psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually, you don’t have a story.

13. You can start by figuring out the Beginning, the Middle, or the End, but you don’t have an episode until you have all three.

14. Big suspenseful act outs (the last moments before the commercials) aren’t just a gimmick. They’re a good way to structure an hour of entertainment to make sure the audience is invested and your pacing is solid.

15. Every scene should be a consequence of the previous scene or a refutation of it.

16. A scene also needs a Beginning, Middle, and End. The end should propel the characters and/or audience into the next scene.

17. Every scene is a negotiation/confrontation between two or more characters who want different things or have different ideas on how to solve the same problem.

18. A good action scene is still a character scene. With punching. (This applies to sex scenes too, but you know, with sex.)

19. A crap page is better than a blank one.

20. It’s easier to cut than to add.

21. Good things rarely happen in the Writers Room after dinner. Go home, get some rest, write pages at home if you have to, start fresh in the morning.  Writers who have a life outside the writing room are better writers. Beware the showrunner who doesn’t want to go home to their family. That said…

22. Script by day one of Pre-Production. No matter what.

23. You’re a writer first. Almost nothing happening on set or in post is more important than the writing. Delegate when possible.

24. Make an extra effort to surround yourself with writers who are different from you (background, race, gender, orientation, etc). Listen to their perspectives, especially on experiences alien to you.

25. And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make. In TV writing and life in general. 

“Thoughts on one of the hardest things: banishing the imagined bad faith reader from your writing process” by Melissa Febos on Twitter is hitting really hard today.

This.

I don’t remember if this was in the book or if I heard her tell a story in an interview, but I learned somewhere years ago that when Allison Bechdel sent her mother a draft copy of Are You My Mother? (Bechdel’s frankly very exposing graphic memoir about her relationship with her mother), asking for, I don’t know? Feedback? Permission? Absolution? her mother’s whole and entire response was “It coheres.” Two words and a period. And it’s absolutely true about that book and the most impressive thing about it, actually. The book collages an enormous amount of time and space and thought into a coherent piece of art. It could so easily have failed to do so, but it succeeded. I think about this all the time both because of the efficiency of Bechdel’s mother’s commentary and the myriad conclusions I find myself itching to leap to about her personality based on that single anecdote, but also because it got my thinking about coherence as an artistic value. As perhaps the final artistic value. So, you had something to say. Did you say it?

If I remember correctly it was an email, too, without a greeting or salutation, which is so white christian northeasterner it makes me want to scream. Not the point.

Like. Ms Helen Bechdel did not choose to share whether she considered her daughter’s work truthful, or necessary, or kind. She did not corroborate or contradict Allison Bechdel’s story about her. She only acknowledged that the story cohered. Which like, point one, master stroke, because it means she’s interacting with the work as a reader rather than as a character, but point two, maybe a story doesn’t actually have to be truthful or necessary or kind. Maybe that isn’t what storytelling is. Maybe a story just has to cohere. Certainly someone being told a story from the outside doesn’t have the tools to know if a story was honest. When you’re told a story you only know if it coheres. How much of what we think of as honesty and courage in storytelling is really just coherence. I’ve been a little crazy about this anecdote since I was roughly fifteen.

The Writing Life, Annie Dillard

I don’t remember if this was in the book or if I heard her tell a story in an interview, but I learned somewhere years ago that when Allison Bechdel sent her mother a draft copy of Are You My Mother? (Bechdel’s frankly very exposing graphic memoir about her relationship with her mother), asking for, I don’t know? Feedback? Permission? Absolution? her mother’s whole and entire response was “It coheres.” Two words and a period. And it’s absolutely true about that book and the most impressive thing about it, actually. The book collages an enormous amount of time and space and thought into a coherent piece of art. It could so easily have failed to do so, but it succeeded. I think about this all the time both because of the efficiency of Bechdel’s mother’s commentary and the myriad conclusions I find myself itching to leap to about her personality based on that single anecdote, but also because it got my thinking about coherence as an artistic value. As perhaps the final artistic value. So, you had something to say. Did you say it?

If I remember correctly it was an email, too, without a greeting or salutation, which is so white christian northeasterner it makes me want to scream. Not the point.

Like. Ms Helen Bechdel did not choose to share whether she considered her daughter’s work truthful, or necessary, or kind. She did not corroborate or contradict Allison Bechdel’s story about her. She only acknowledged that the story cohered. Which like, point one, master stroke, because it means she’s interacting with the work as a reader rather than as a character, but point two, maybe a story doesn’t actually have to be truthful or necessary or kind. Maybe that isn’t what storytelling is. Maybe a story just has to cohere. Certainly someone being told a story from the outside doesn’t have the tools to know if a story was honest. When you’re told a story you only know if it coheres. How much of what we think of as honesty and courage in storytelling is really just coherence. I’ve been a little crazy about this anecdote since I was roughly fifteen.