That is the way you maximize the facility of trigger and impact in your tales
Do you include cause and effect in your stories?
Have you ever had days when life felt like a broken Rube Goldberg machine? Cobbled together from discarded rubbish, hobbling and missing the connections that bring a satisfactory result?
If so, you share something with most of humanity. Most of us feel that way at some point.
A person's life consists of an enormous mass of cause-and-effect events on a scale that is so large that connections are seldom obvious or comprehensible. In contrast, a character's story is a relevant subset of such events where the causal relationships are obvious. Sometimes frank and sometimes subtle, but always present when you want to create a story that will resonate with readers.
In this post, you will learn about the cause and effect of the story and the top four ways to mess it up.
Why is?
We all seek purpose in our hearts and strive to understand what is happening in our lives. Readers tend to have stories that meet this need.
If your story seems more like a faulty Goldberg machine than a well-oiled mechanism with all of its parts in working order, read on to find out how the power of cause and effect can help.
Build your author's skills
I fondly remember this important quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Flat men believe in luck or circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
The same goes for writers. Making cause and effect an important part of your writer's skills will go a long way towards making sure every scene makes an impact. This means that it will add to the outcome of the story as a whole.
In fiction, the causes often come from the background of the characters, while the effects lie in the plot developments that arise from these background causes.
As a writer, you should be aware of these relationships throughout your story, in the continuity of your scenes, and in the line-by-line actions.
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Stories are based on cause and effect. The causes often lie in the background of the characters. Their effects are the resulting action developments.
Think in terms of stimulus and response
In his book "Scene and Structure", Jack M. Bickham writes: "Stimulus and reaction are cause and effect that become more specific and immediate." He gives these guidelines for using this technique to improve the clarity and credibility of your writing:
- The stimulus must be external. That is, action or dialogue, something that could be observed if the transaction were on a stage.
- The answer must also be external in the same way.
- For each stimulus you have to show an answer.
- For each response you want, you need to provide a stimulus.
- The response must usually follow the stimulus immediately.
- If the response to a surface stimulus is not logical, you usually need to explain.
If you don't follow these guidelines, two bad things can happen.
- Your reader will be confused, and a confused reader is a frustrated reader with little motivation to stick with your story.
- You lose credibility. A reader who cannot believe in your story will stop reading.
4 ways to mess it up
Bickham goes further into the common ways that writers mess up the stimulus-response transaction:
1. Stimulus without reaction
You can show a stimulus and then show no external response (or one that doesn't fit or doesn't make sense).
Here is an example.
Let's say your character Mike opens the door to the courthouse for Jennifer. In Mike's act of holding the door, you gave an incentive.
The reader will expect an answer from Jennifer. She may thank him, tell him to drop dead or just go through with it, but if you don't close the stimulus-response cycle, it will annoy the reader at some level and weaken your story.
Granted, this is a simplified example, but I hope it got to the point. Details are included in a story on a must-know basis.
If it's important to draw attention to Mike holding the door for Jennifer, it's equally important to include her response.
You might think the reader was taking an action from Jennifer, but Bickham states that a high percentage of readers don't connect these dots.
Be on the safe side and close the loop. Remember, we are talking about things that happen largely on an unconscious level.
The reader will not know what is bothering them, just that something is.
2. Reaction without stimulus
You can view a character response if there was no credible incentive to do so.
As writers, we know and see much more than the reader, and sometimes we forget to point it out to the reader. I once read a story by a beginning writer who described a spectator at a baseball game jumping and running from the stands. That was the answer, but no stimulus was shown.
When I asked about it, the writer explained that the man had stepped into an anthill.
The problem? The reader needs to know about the anthill to understand the reaction. It seems obvious, but this type of error is pretty common.
3. Too much time between stimulus and response
You can allow so much time between stimulus and response that the logical relationship between the two events is no longer obvious.
Stimulus: When Sarah stepped on the trail, a large black snake slid over her boot.
Answer: Three hours later, she screamed.
If your scene doesn't follow a well-timed chain of cause and effect, there is a void that readers can get lost in.
4. Reaction, then stimulus?
You can get it backwards.
Example: Scott jumped after a clap of thunder shook the ground.
Better: A clap of thunder shook the ground and made Scott jump.
Get it right
Do not despair! Bickham showed us how often writers fall short in this area, but he also gives guidelines for finding and correcting problems in the flow of your cause and effect.
Every stimulus needs an answer
Make sure that any stimulus you set up receives a response. that whatever cause you bring into play creates a corresponding effect. And put it in the right order.
When you need to explain why something just happened, tell the story backwards.
Read what you wrote. Do the results of each scene set the stage for the next?
Examine your work line by line. Have you closed the loop on every stimulus-response cycle? Do the actions affect what comes next?
Think Chekhov's weapon – if you hung a pistol on the wall in Act 1. It was to be fired in the following act.
Every answer needs a stimulus
Make sure that each response is preceded by an appropriate stimulus. that every effect has a triggering cause.
Readers ask for more in return for the time and effort they put into a story than convenient inferences from the Scooby Doo variety. You owe your readers to setting up the payouts properly and this requires that you credibly pour the cause into your story before getting the effect.
If you do this correctly, your readers will sail through your story with great satisfaction.
What's in it for you
It may seem like a lot of effort, but like anything else, practice gets easier with it. Bickham provided an excellent reason to improve this ability:
Once you are good at it as a writer, you can make almost anything in your story happen. All you have to do is figure out what is causing it.
Additionally, you will make your reader happy, and one happy reader will seek more of your work.
Better yet, they'll tell their friends to read it too!
Are you having trouble getting the cause and effect story elements right in your own stories? Tell us about it in the comments below.
WORK OUT
Identify cause and effect relationships in a script you are currently working on. Then take a quarter of an hour to check that you've closed the loops, providing an incentive for each reaction, and tracking each cause with its payoff effect.
If you don't have a current piece, create a character (maybe a retired karate teacher?) And think of some cause and effect relationships that could determine their story. Write them down.
When you're done, post your exercise in the comments section.
And when you post, please leave feedback for your co-writers!
Joslyn Chase
