CAUSALITY WON'T KILL YOUR WRITING CAREER

I received the following question from our office hours: As I write, I've been thinking about causality. George Saunders discusses this in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain as one of the main reasons some writers stop writing: they can't figure out causality. I'm wondering about your thoughts on this craft element.

What follows is my response.

When George — who’s an old friend — talks about causality in his book, it’s part of a larger homebrew argument about what stories are and what they do.    

(We writers all have our homebrews and while one homebrew can be useful to some folks, no homebrew will ever be useful to everyone.  Literature is too complicated for autarchs.)   

To answer your question usefully will require me to share my own argument for what stories are and what they do (hopefully I’ll explore this more in a later post), but for now let’s focus on causality.

At its most basic, causality is the science of cause and effect.  In a narrative context, causality explains (or at least intimates) why A caused B, which then led to C, which provoked D and E in succession, and so on.    

Causality is the reason behind a sequence of events. 

In his brilliant book, George is all-in on causality, considers it the crown jewel of a writer’s craft.  It’s a “superpower,” “the thing the audience actually shows up for,” what “separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t.”

I agree with George that causality matters for writers (as it matters for historians, journalists, detectives), but in my own homebrew causality ain’t the reason that readers come to fiction or why some writers publish and others do not — in my homebrew, causality is a component of larger, far more important, mechanics. 

But before we head into the deep end, let’s clarify what we’re talking about when we’re talking about causality. 

All of us have experience with real world causality — which we call our lives.  Real world causality tends to have universal properties — jump off a plane midflight without a parachute on a vacation and jump off a planet midflight without a parachute during a bombing run — chances are the outcomes will be identical.  Despite our hand-waves and theories and consolations, real world causality also tends towards the extremely elusive, and is too often nigh-impossible to truly grasp — which is to say we rarely know why things really happen.

Fictional causality, the causality in our fiction and movies and video games and comic books, which we learn from reading and screening, has its own rules and tends to be far clearer — no piece of fiction, after all, can come within a light year of the universe’s profound inscrutability.  Fictional causality is also far less coherent than its real world counterpart. 

Imagine, for example, a neorealistic story in the Ferrante mode: if, on a first date, the middle-aged protagonist jumps out of a high second story window onto an active roadway, chances are a reader will not be shocked if said protagonist ends up in a full body cast or if, as a consequence of that long convalescence, they lose their job, acquire immense debt, end up back home with their parents, or living out of their car.  If, on the other hand, a middle-aged James Bond or a middle-aged Jack Reacher-type jumps out of a high second story window onto an active roadway, not only would you expect the protagonist to run off as if nothing happened, any temporary limp acquired from the fall would scarcely limit their phenomenal asskickery.

What should be clear is that unlike real world causality, fictional causality is not remotely unified or universal in its expression; in fact fictional causality varies from narrative to narrative, has a trillion trillion faces.

Fictional causality is also highly contingent. 

Contingent on what? 

Contingent on the genre that the story partakes in. 

Generic storyworlds, after all, have uniquely defining causal economies that are central to their popularity and whose silhouettes their fans could spot at night in a distance in the middle of a storm. 

To put it simply: different Genres have different causality.   

The causality of a police procedural is notably different from the causality in a heroic fantasy.  The causality of a heroic fantasy story like Harry Potter would seem downright demented if transferred wholecloth to a Lorrie Moore storyworld and vice versa (barring high level subversion, that is).  The causality of a fantasy novel like The Blade Itself is not the causality of a Toni Morrison novel.  The causality of a Reacher novel is not the causality of a Tommy Orange novel.  The causality of the Twilight novels is not the causality of Mary Gaitskill.  The causality of a Stephen King novel is not the causality in a William Gibson novel.

What counts as good causality in one genre might be preposterous and ridiculous in another.  Some genres foreground causality; others downplay it.  Stories of incident, for example, have a totally different relationship to causality than stories of character. A traditional airport thriller, for example, requires a gift for causality that the average literary fiction writer rarely needs. 

Even death, that most final of finalities, is negotiable in certain genres.

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We learn real world causality by living life.  We learn fictional causality by reading genres (or screening them).  Read enough literary fiction and you become fluent in literary fiction’s causal economies.  Read enough fantasy or horror or scifi or romance or Westerns and it’s the same.  

But here’s the key - we acquire fluency in fictional causality not by observing it remotely, abstractly, intellectually but by experiencing it through our reading in the specific Characters and Conflicts and Worlds that genre stories’ privilege.  It’s the Character and their Conflict and their World together and our immersion into that narrative crucible that enact and reveal a storyworld’s causality.   

Our fluency in fictional causalities therefore isn’t solely intellectual; after all, we read with our whole nervous system, with our entire bodies, which means we learn that a James Bond character can survive leaps from a burning helicopter (and a schlubby neorealistic lump cannot) in both our minds and our bodies because we are immersed in the Story.

Similarly, writers don’t learn to do causality in abstraction or impose causality on a story from on high. 

Writers learn to do causality by creating Characters and Conflicts and Worlds in their genre of choice, and putting the Big Three into a productive relationship — into dramatic symbiosis.

In my experience, good storytelling (Character + Conflict + World in dramatic symbiosis) begets good causality and is precisely “the thing the audience actually shows up for” and what “separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t.”

In my experience, good causality is the consequence of good storytelling and not its source.

As long as characters and their conflict and their worlds are strong together, causality will flow naturally, like heat from a flame. 

Now, to be extra super clear: I’m not arguing that Causality doesn’t matter.  Causality matters and a writer should keep an eye on it—same way a writer keeps an eye on character consistency, on blocking time right etc — anddepending on the genre, it could matter quite a lot.

Earlier I mentioned the airport genre.  In the standard airport thriller a writer who can’t do kick-ass causality might have a problem.  (When I read George’s comments in his hombrew — “Always be escalating. That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation.” and “We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy” and “Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for” —I’m convinced he’s speaking of the thriller genre novel and not the books he himself writes but what do I know). 

A writer who can’t do kick-ass causality might have a problem.  

Please, notice I said might. Because let’s be honest: an inability to do causality well or an indifference to causality clearly ain’t stopped a whole bunch of published writers from having enviable careers. Stephen King is not exactly awesome on the causal front (and he ain’t alone).  But King more than compensates with his voice, his character work, his gripping conflicts and his ability to capture and transfer fear into his readers.

In a system like the one I’m describing—where causality is consequence of good storytelling and not its source—bad causality ain’t a deal breaker. A writer will rectify that lameness or disinterest by focusing on other other aspects of good storytelling. Storytelling is a robust, can tolerate patent weakness in one of its core element as long as the writer brings added fire to other areas.

Thank you for your question, Victoria, I hope this helps.