by Lisa Cron
Again, the tension is palpable, isn’t it? Because conflict, as it turns out, isn’t ephemeral at all. It’s visceral. It’s the space you leave for the reader, allowing her to leap into the fray and imagine the possibilities. Never forget that story unfolds in the space between two opposing forces. If you make sure the reader’s always aware of the conflicting realities the protagonist finds herself trapped between, you’ll be off to the races—together.
CHAPTER 7: CHECKPOINT
Have you made sure that the basis of future conflict is sprouting, beginning on page one? Can we glimpse avenues that will lead to conflict? Can we anticipate the problems that the protagonist might not yet be aware of?
Have you established the “versus” so that the reader is aware of the specific rock and hard place the protagonist is wedged between? Can we anticipate how he will have to change in order to get what he wants?
Does the conflict force the protagonist to take action, whether it’s to rationalize it away or actually change? Imagine what you would want to avoid if you were your protagonist—and then make her face it.
Have you made sure that the story gains something by withholding specific facts for a big reveal later? Don’t be afraid of giving too much away; you can always pare back later. Showing your hand is often a very good thing indeed.
Once the reveal is known, will everything that happened up to that point still make sense in light of this new information? Remember, the story must make complete sense without the reveal, but in light of the reveal, the story must make even more sense.
WE’RE OFTEN WARNED not to make assumptions. Did you ever actually try it? It’s like saying, “Don’t breathe.” We make assumptions about everything, every second of the day—largely because, after breathing, our survival depends on it. We assume that if we cross the street without looking, we might be mowed down; we assume that eating the leftover creamed tuna we accidentally left on the counter overnight is probably not such a bright idea; we assume that if the phone rings after two a.m. it can’t be good. If we couldn’t assume the result of, well, anything, why would we chance getting out of bed in the morning? So we assume. As philosopher David Hume pointed out, as far as we’re concerned, causality is “the cement of the universe.”1
Are our assumptions sometimes wrong? Decidedly. Here’s an apt case in point, from Antonio Damasio: “Usually the brain is assumed to be a passive recording medium, like film, onto which the characteristics of an object, as analyzed by sensory detectors, can be mapped faithfully. If the eye is the passive innocent camera, the brain is the passive, virgin celluloid. This is pure fiction.” Instead, Damasio explains, “Our memories are prejudiced, in the full sense of the term, by our past history and beliefs.”2
In other words, our assumptions are based on the consequences of our prior experiences. But we don’t stop there. While a few other species take a rudimentary stab at observing and predicting what might happen next, we alone try to explain why.3 Understanding why “this” caused “that” is what allows us to anticipate what might happen next and decide what the hell we’re going to do about it. It lets us theorize about the future and, better yet, try to change it to our advantage.
As for the wrong assumptions this sometimes begets? It’s our acceptance of fallibility that makes us human, as evidenced by the courage we muster to take risks, knowing things might not turn out as planned. It’s when they don’t that people usually tell us not to make assumptions. What they really mean is, the assumption you’re making isn’t working; try another. Because very often, as Kathryn Schulz of Being Wrong attests: “We think this one thing is going to happen, and something else happens instead.”4
Story arises from the conflict between “this one thing we thought was going to happen” and “what happened instead.” It then plays out in a clear cause-and-effect trajectory from start to finish—otherwise, it would be “just one damn thing after another.” So in this chapter we’ll determine how to make sure your story follows one astonishingly simple mantra; we’ll explore how to harness the external cause and effect of your plot to the more powerful internal cause and effect of your story; we’ll take a look at why “show, don’t tell” is a matter of why rather than what; and we’ll introduce the all-important “And so?” test to guarantee that neither cause-and-effect trajectory ever goes off the rails.
The Logic of If, Then, Therefore
As we know, both life and story are driven by emotion, but what they’re ordered by is logic. Logic is the yang to emotion’s yin. It’s no surprise that our memories—how we make sense of the world—are logically interrelated. According to Damasio, the brain tends to organize the profusion of input and memories, “much like a film editor would, by giving it some kind of coherent narrative structure in which certain actions are said to cause certain effects.”5
Since the brain analyzes everything in terms of cause and effect, when a story doesn’t follow a clear cause-and-effect trajectory, the brain doesn’t know what to make of it—which can trigger a sensation of physical distress,6 not to mention the desire to pitch the book out the window. The good news is, when it comes to keeping your story on track, it boils down to the mantra if, then, therefore. If I put my hand in the fire (action), then I’ll get burned (reaction). Therefore, I’d better not put my hand in the fire (decision).
Action, reaction, decision—it’s what drives a story forward. From beginning to end, a story must follow a cause-and-effect trajectory so when your protagonist finally tackles her ultimate goal, the path that led her there not only is clear, but, in hindsight, reveals exactly why this confrontation was inevitable from the very start. Note the critical words in hindsight. Everything in a story should indeed be utterly predictable, but only from the satisfying perspective of “the end.”
This is not to say that a story has to be linear or that the cause-and-effect route it takes must be chronological—quite the contrary. It can take death-defying leaps in time and location and even be told backward: witness Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow, Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal, and Christopher Nolan’s film Memento. But what must move forward from page one is the clear logic of the emotional arc—that is, the story the reader is following. Even a book as seemingly “experimental” as Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, which is told in standalone short stories that follow several characters back and forth in time, follows a novel’s arc. Egan herself says, “When I hear that something is experimental, I tend to think that means the experiment will drown out the story. If having a story that’s compelling—[that makes] you want to know what will happen—is traditional, then ultimately I am a traditionalist. That is what readers care about. It’s what I care about as a reader.”7
To create a story the reader will care about, the narrative must follow an emotional cause-and-effect trajectory from the outset. How? By obeying the basic laws of the physical universe. Thus the key thing to remember is, naturally, Newton’s first law of thermodynamics: you can’t get something from nothing. Or as the equally brainy Albert Einstein reportedly quipped, “Nothing happens until something moves.” In other words, no matter how much something catches you off guard, nothing ever really occurs out of the blue. Not in real life, not in a story. There is always a cause-and-effect trajectory, whether or not the protagonist—or in the case of real life, you and I—see it coming.
We tend to be blissfully clueless as to the fly ball that is about to bean us—a ball everyone else has been watching since the batter smacked it up into the air. So although Leslie has no idea that her boyfriend Seth is sleeping with Heidi in accounting, the whole office figured it out the instant he began misting up over the magnificence of Heidi’s spreadsheets. Hence, although when Leslie finally finds out that Seth’s a big fat cheater, it’ll be news to her, her coworkers will have spent weeks taking bets on who she’ll take down first—Seth or Heidi. Of course, once Leslie finds out about their little tryst, she’s going do some looking back herself, and dam
ned if she won’t discover that there is, in fact, a pattern of telltale signs, which she’ll now see with dizzying clarity, as if they were dominoes neatly lined up to fall just so.
The one difference, however, between the way Newton’s law works in a story and the way it works in real life is that in real life there will be a million irrelevant things happening at the same time, whereas in a story there will be nothing that does not in some way affect the cause-and-effect trajectory. It’s the writer’s job to zero in on the story’s particular “if, then, therefore” pattern and stick with it throughout. This trajectory is the track that the story’s narrative train rumbles down. Sure, it might have twisty hairpin curves, switchbacks, harrowing ups and downs, even a few reversals, but the train itself never jumps track, derails or, hopefully, runs out of steam.
But wait—with all due respect to Jennifer Egan, what about experimental literature? What about avant-garde fiction? It doesn’t seem as bound by the laws of cause and effect, or by any laws at all, for that matter. In fact, some say its raison d’être is to prove that fiction doesn’t need a plot, a protagonist, characters, internal logic, or even actual events, to show that we’ve risen above all that. And hey, what about Ulysses, the first novel to leap headfirst into that seductively self-reflective stream of consciousness? Isn’t it widely acclaimed as the best novel ever written? That was a pretty experimental book in its time. Let’s dive into this question a wee bit deeper, shall we?
MYTH: Experimental Literature Can Break All the Rules of Storytelling with Impunity—In Fact, It’s High Art and Thus Far Superior to Regular Old Novels
REALITY: Novels That Are Hard to Read Aren’t Read
A few years back, Roddy Doyle, widely regarded as Ireland’s best contemporary novelist, stunned an audience gathered in New York to celebrate James Joyce by saying “Ulysses could have done with a good editor.” Warming to his topic, he went on to muse, “You know, people are always putting Ulysses in the top ten books ever written, but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.”8
People like to tackle Ulysses in part because it’s such a hard read that making it to “the end” is a testament to their intelligence (if not endurance). But no matter how smart they are, few people actually enjoy reading it. The trouble is, even unread, such books can do great harm. According to author Jonathan Franzen, books like Ulysses “send this message to the common reader: Literature is horribly hard to read. And this message to the aspiring young writer: Extreme difficulty is the way to earn respect.”9 And therein lies the real problem.
There is a school of writing that holds that it’s the reader’s responsibility to “get it,” rather than the author’s job to communicate it. Many writers of experimental fiction graduated from this particular school with advanced degrees. Thus, when we readers don’t “get it,” the fault is not assumed to be theirs, but ours. This attitude can foster an unconscious contempt for the reader, while freeing the writer from any responsibility beyond his or her own self-expression. It also tends to presuppose the reader’s interest and earnest dedication from word one—as if somehow the reader owes it to the author to choke down every single word.
The trouble is, reading novels freed from the supposed plebeian constraints of plot, character, and even a nodding acquaintance with cause and effect, quickly becomes work. But unlike most of the work we willingly undertake—like heading into the office every day, weeding the garden, or housebreaking that cuddly new pup—it can be hard to see what reward slogging through to the bitter end will bestow. That is, unless reading a book meant to bore you so as to give you the experience of being bored sounds riveting (which, of course, would defeat the purpose). Much more common is the experience a student recently shared with me. She’d just gotten an MFA from a very prestigious university and confessed that many of the books she was required to read made her cry—because they were so mind-numbingly boring. Probably not the author’s intention.
But there’s a deeper, and more interesting, question in play here. Given that story is a form of communication, one we’re wired to respond to, what are these novels, anyway? Are they stories at all? In many cases, the answer is a resounding no. This isn’t to say that a select group of readers might not learn something from them—after all, we learn from textbooks, math equations, and dissertations. And there can pleasure in them too. But the pleasure doesn’t come from the joy of reading a compelling story as much as from having solved a difficult problem, which is genuinely intoxicating. It makes you feel smart, like doing the Sunday crossword puzzle in ink. There’s nothing wrong with that.
What is wrong, though, is the notion that if you’re really enjoying a story, it automatically means that both you and the story are woefully lowbrow. The irony is that the hardwired pleasure a good story brings proves it’s necessary to our survival. Just as we evolved biologically to find food tasty so we’d eat it, story triggers pleasure so we’ll pay attention to it.
As writer A. S. Byatt so eloquently says, “Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood. Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of consciousness. But storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape.”10
And who would want to? The good news is that experimental fiction can be harnessed to what the reader is wired to respond to. In fact, the best of it already is. Which brings us right back to Jennifer Egan—who, having avowed that the most important thing is that the reader wants to know what happens next, adds, “Now if I can have that along with a strong girding of ideas and some kind of exciting technical forays—then that is just the jackpot.”11
Hitting the jackpot means finding the narrative thread that gives meaning to everything that happens in your glorious experiment. So let’s get back to figuring out exactly how to do just that.
The Two Levels of Cause and Effect
Whether experimental, traditional, or somewhere in between, we know a story plays out on two levels at once—the protagonist’s internal struggle (what the story is actually about) and the external events (the plot)—so it’s no surprise that cause and effect governs both, allowing them to dovetail and thus create a seamless narrative thread.
1. Plot-wise cause and effect plays out on the surface level, as one event logistically triggers the next: Joe pops Clyde’s shiny red balloon; Joe gets kicked out of clown school.
2. Story-wise cause and effect plays out on a deeper level—that of meaning. It explains why Joe pops Clyde’s balloon, even though he knows it will probably get him expelled.
Since stories are about how what happens affects someone—Joe, for instance—the reason he popped the balloon is more important than the fact that he popped it. In short, the why carries more weight than the what. Think of it as a pecking order: the why comes first, because it drives the what; the why is the cause; the what is the effect. Let’s say, for example, Joe knew Clyde is secretly a killer clown and was about to use the balloon to lure a trusting tot into the deserted big top. Although Joe’s dream has always been to pile into that teeny tiny car with all the other clowns, he knows he will never be able to live with himself if he doesn’t stop Clyde, so he pops the balloon. Thus the story-wise cause and effect is not about how your protagonist gets from point A (being in clown school) to point B (not being in clown school), it’s about why. The internal, story-level cause-and-effect trajectory tracks the evolution of the protagonist’s inner issue, which is what motivates his actions. It reveals how he makes sense of what happens in light of his goal, and how he arrives at the decision that catapults him into the next scene.
It may come as a surprise that this is, in fact, what’s meant by that perennial old saw, “Show, don’t tell,” which might just be the most woefully misunderstood writing maxim on the books.
MYTH: “Show, Don’t Tell” Is Literal—Don’t Tell Me John Is Sad, Show Him Crying
REALITY: “Show
, Don’t Tell” Is Figurative—Don’t Tell Me John Is Sad, Show Me Why He’s Sad
If there’s one thing writers are told from the get-go, it’s “show, don’t tell.” Good advice. Trouble is, it’s rarely explained, so it’s often completely misconstrued by being taken literally, as if “show” inherently means visually, from the outside in, as if you were watching a film. So when a writer hears, “Don’t tell me that John is sad, show me,” she spends hours writing how “John’s tears fell like a torrential rainstorm, flooding the basement in a glittering release of everything he’d held in for so very long, knocking out the power and nearly drowning the cat.” No, no, no! We don’t want to see John cry (the effect); we want to see what made him cry (the cause).
What “show” almost always means is, let’s see the event itself unfold. Instead of telling us that when John’s father unexpectedly booted him out of the family business in front of everyone at the yearly stockholder’s meeting, he cried a river, show us the scene in which he was ousted. Why? There are two very good reasons:
1. If you tell us after the fact that John was fired, it’s a done deal, so there’s nothing to anticipate. Worse, it’s opaque—meaning there is nothing we can learn from it because we don’t even know what, exactly, happened. But if you show us a scene in which John strides into the board meeting, sure he’s going to be made CEO, well then, anything could happen (hello, suspense!)—and we’d get to see it. He could talk, blackmail, or yodel his way back into his dad’s good graces, or he could surprise everyone by quitting first—which would mean that those tears we watched him cry were tears of joy. Scenes (even flashbacks) are immediate and fraught with the possibility that all could be lost—or gained. The same info, summarized after the fact? It’s yesterday’s news.