Causality and Momentum in Narrative

Last week I read and commented on a friend’s novel-in-progress, and it has me thinking about causality. More specifically, about how establishing a pattern of cause and effect in your fictional world builds momentum in the narrative.

By causality I mean the direct and indirect results of actions and incidents. Cause and effect allows for a logical flow of events. Not a predictable narrative, but a logical one. Like this: A character files for divorce. To take the edge off her pain, she meets up with an old flame at a bar. After a few beers, she drives home. On the way, she gets pulled over by a cop, and is arrested for driving drunk. Logical flow of events. One scene leads into the next. Cause and effect.

Without establishing a flow of causality, the narrative can feel unanchored and random. Causality makes the reader care. Breaking the logical flow can break trust with the reader. Expectation of the effect creates suspense and keeps the reader turning the page to find out more. Without cause and effect, you have a random string of scenes. With cause and effect, you have a story.

Let’s take our character from before. Say that she files for divorce. Then she makes a sandwich. Then she goes to work. Then she meets an old flame at a bar. Then she goes home. Then she goes to work. Then she meets a new coworker. Then she goes out and has a great time. Then she gets sad. In this version of the narrative, there is no causality. Scenes do not build on top of one another.

Let’s try that again. She files for divorce. She tries to go about her life like normal, but the pain of the divorce keeps her from focusing at work and she botches up a huge project. She gets fired. She decides to live on her savings for a while and take a trip backpacking around Asia. She drives her dog to her mother’s, and takes off for Taiwan. In this version, each scene is a result of the previous one. Plot builds like a snowball rolling down a hillside. Momentum.

In a narrative that isn’t linear, links of causality still exist, but may be revealed out of order. Take Louis Erdrich’s novel The Plague of Doves, an epic multi-generational family saga that is anything but chronological. The novel starts with a murder and takes the whole 300-and-something pages to reveal the who and why. The glue holding the novel together is the slow revelation of cause and effect.

Causality doesn’t have to be obvious. At the beginning of stories, causality can be and often is tenuous. Establishment of new subplots can seem random at first. But as the story starts to gain momentum—like our accelerating snowball—causality has to increase, speeding toward the end, which, as we know, should be both surprising and inevitable.