CHAPTER 3

STRUCTURE IN
MICROCOSM:
CAUSE AND EFFECT

WHEN MOST NONWRITERS TALK ABOUT “form” or “structure,” they reverse the usual cliché and can’t see the trees for the forest. They look at book-length elements – or even such nonstructural aspects as theme – and seldom get down to the nitty-gritty where modern fiction structure really begins. As a writer, however, you can’t afford to do that. You need to understand structure in the larger elements (which will come later), but first you need to understand how the same structural principles work almost line-by-line in the modern story.

We’re talking here about the simple laws of cause and effect, stimulus and response. Until you understand these perfectly, and can apply them in your fiction with unerring expertise, you can’t hope to understand anything bigger in terms of structure.

CAUSE AND EFFECT

So what do cause and effect, stimulus and response, have to do with the structure of fiction?

Everything, that’s all.

In the real, everyday world, accident, coincidence and fete often play a major role in determining “how things work out” in a person’s life. Bad things happen to good people for no reason, and as today’s politics all too often proves, the opposite is equally true. Given such evident random meaninglessness in real life, people sometimes grow cynical, or join the bad guys, or give up. Things often don’t make much sense.

In most popular fiction, the situation is quite different. While the workings of luck, coincidence, fete, etc., may be shown from time to time, fiction must make more sense than real life if general readers are to find it credible. So, for example, in real life someone may fell ill for no apparent reason and with no evident cause. In fiction, the character would have to be seen depressed about recent developments and tired from overwork; he would then have to be seen walking into an office or home where people were already sick with the dread illness; and then one of the sick persons might even have to sneeze in his face – all before the reader would find credible what in real life would happen without apparent cause.

To restate this differently: in fiction, effects (plot developments) must have causes (background), and vice versa. If you want someone to fall ill (and want the reader to believe it!), you must first build in the background (perhaps a raging epidemic), a character who is overworked and weary, and who also is depressed enough to have a poorly functioning immune system, and then you have to provide the more immediate (present story time) cause, the entering of the house and finally the deadly sneeze.

Much of plotting from chapter to chapter deals with this kind of juggling of events so that one thing leads logically to another, cause-and-effect fashion. Writers over the years have probably sweated enough to fill Lake Erie as they tried to figure out how to motivate Priscilla to open the locked door (cause), or what next might happen after she did so (effect).

In real life, blind luck has to be accepted because, after all, there it is – it just happened, period. But the fiction reader demands more credibility than he usually gets in real life. So it’s up to you, the fiction writer, to build your story in such a way that every cause you put in has an effect downstream in the story, sooner or later (and preferably sooner!), and for every effect you plot out, you have to figure out a cause that would make it happen.

Once you are good at this as a writer, you can make almost anything happen in your story; all you have to do is figure out what is to cause it. And once you have had that particular thing happen with good reason, then your next plotting step is infinitely simpler because all you have to do is take the next logical step and ask yourself, “Now that that has happened, what does it, in turn, cause to happen?”

However, this kind of cause-and-effect planning and story presentation does more than simply help the reader suspend disbelief. Because this kind of presentation shows a world in which things do make sense – in which everything isn’t just meaningless chaos and chance – the resulting story also has the effect of offering a little hope to the reader: a suggestion by implication that life doesn’t have to be meaningless, and that bad things don’t always have to happen to good people for no reason … a hint that maybe the reader can seize some control of his own life after all, and that good effort may sometimes actually pay off – and our existence may indeed even have some kind of meaning.

For a person like me, who isn’t blessed with a very deep mind, the more far-reaching implications of this type of cause-and-effect rationality in fiction seem to be very far-reaching and important indeed. I suspect that when you write a story that makes sense through use of cause and effect, you are also implying, somehow, that life is worth living. Personally I like that.

So if you think at all as I do – or even if you don’t, but would like to produce fiction that makes sense and has appeal – I hope you will ponder often and deeply about causes and effects in your own fiction. Look at every turn in the story – every event – and make sure that there is cause for it. Look for causes on which you may not have followed up with resulting events. For to do otherwise is to invite disbelief (at best) on the part of your readership.

I remember, for example, a student story handed in to me once at the University of Oklahoma. In this particular story, there was a violent windstorm at night, to which much description was devoted. (This made it a big cause of something, right?) But in the morning, none of the story characters mentioned it, the sun was shining, and the lawns beyond the house windows did not have so much as a blown-down leaf on them. It was easy enough to fix, but the writer had forgotten entirely to show the effect of the storm; if she had sent the story out in its present condition, it would have lost credibility for the editor-reader at that point very early in the going because a strong cause had been shown and its effects had to be shown as well, even if briefly – leaves on the lawns, perhaps a broken tree limb, comments by a character or two about the aftermath. All this could have been done very briefly, but it had to be done.

Similarly, I recall another student’s novel in which the hero and the villain were together in a small starship hurtling through space. Suddenly the engines went dead and the two archenemies saw that they had only one escape pod – meaning one would live and one would die. This was all fine, but the story lost credibility for me at the instant the engines failed. Why? Because it was just bad luck. An effect had been presented without cause. (Again, it was easy enough to fix: The writer put in a brief segment ahead of the engine failure, showing the villain sabotaging it. Of course that required a bit of villain-motivation, showing why the villain thought it was a good idea, but again this could have been handled quite briefly by showing the villain intending only to slow the engines so his cronies might catch up, or some such.)

Please note that most such cause-effect story repairs can be handled in a few words. The key point here is not to exhaust the reader with great details, but simply to make sure that author-inserted causes are shown to have effects, and author-desired effects can be seen to have had causes.

STIMULUS AND RESPONSE

Cause and effect, however, are not operative only in such larger fiction elements as background, character motive, etc. Cause and effect work at an even more minute level, where they surface in the form of physical stimulus and response – and are every bit as important.

Stimulus and response are cause and effect made more specific and immediate. They function right now in the story, this instant – this punch making the other man duck, for example, or this question making the other person reply at once, or this bolt of lightning making Sally jump out of her shoes in fright.

Again, in real life we may see people do things for no apparent immediate reason. We may witness responses for which we can’t find stimulus. A man or woman may burst into tears in the midst of what seems to us a perfectly casual conversation. Or Sally may jump in sudden fright for some reason we can’t see or hear at all.

Conversely, we may – in real life – see stimuli for which we would expect an immediate response, and yet get – nothing. Joe may say, “I feel terribly depressed” (a strong stimulus), yet his friend Mary may reply as if no verbal stimulus was sent, saying nothing at all or maybe saying something like, “It was certainly an exciting game Saturday.” You may stop a stranger on the street to ask directions, and receive no response whatsoever, not even a silent, hostile stare.

Such responses without stimuli or stimuli that get no discernible response are believable in everyday life, of course, because – as in the case of larger cause-and-effect elements – the incredible transaction is simply there, in the actual world, and one can hardly refuse to believe the evidence before one’s own eyes.

We constantly struggle to make our fiction credible, however, because our readers can at any moment stop believing our story. Therefore, in even the simplest transactions in fiction, we must always remember a few simple rules:

• Stimulus must be external – that is, action or dialogue, something that could be witnessed if the transaction were on a stage.
• Response must also be external in the same way.
• For every stimulus, you must show a response.
• For every desired response, you must provide a stimulus.
• Response usually must follow stimulus at once.
• When response to stimulus is not logical on the surface, you must ordinarily explain it.

A few examples should make these rules clearer in your mind.

Let’s suppose you have a segment in your story where Joe and Sam are playing catch with a baseball in the front yard. If you show the following stimulus –

Joe threw the ball to Sam.

Then you must show Sam’s response, such as –

Sam caught it. (or)
Sam dropped it. (or)
Sam didn’t see it and it hit him in the nose.

Or something of a similar, immediate response-nature.

How can something as simple as this get messed up? One sees it messed up all the time. Consider this transaction:

(Stimulus) Joe threw the ball to Sam.
“Sure is a nice day!” Sam said.

Now, some might think this is fine, because the reader will assume that Sam caught the ball. I’m afraid that many, many readers, however, will not make that assumption, and a tiny tickle of disbelief will begin far back in their brain somewhere – the obvious question: What happened to the ball???

How do you fix such slips? By showing the completion of the stimulus-response transaction, by providing the response to the stimulus you’ve already shown, thus:

(Stimulus) Joe threw the ball to Sam.
(Response) Sam caught it. “Sure is a nice day to play catch!”

Now this very simple transaction makes sense because the response to Joe’s specific stimulus has been shown. But if you are writing a bit of action like this, please note that you have to stay alert! After Sam caught the ball, completing that stimulus-response transaction, what did he do? He started another one. He said something. So what has to happen next? Of course: Joe has to answer him.

Another example, this time of a response without evident stimulus, might be the following:

Mary walked into the party.
“Oh, no!” Julie groaned, and ran for the exit.

What’s wrong here? Well, evidently Mary’s walking into the party must somehow be intended as a stimulus for Julie’s groan and fast exit. But if we want Julie to show a response of groaning and running, we have to give her a better, clearer reason for so doing – a better stimulus.

Again, the matter might be easily fixed in several ways. Here is an obvious one:

Mary walked into the party, wearing a strapless blue gown.

“Oh no!” Julie – wearing an identical dress – groaned, and ran for the exit.

Of such simple “fixes” is credible fiction made.

Of course it might have been possible, in terms of the above transaction, to build in a bit of background prior to the incident – perhaps showing Julie’s purchase of her blue strapless gown, the importance of the party to her, and her lurking terror of looking anything like archrival Mary at such a big event. If the writer had given this background shortly before the stimulus-response transaction, then it might have been okay as first written. The points to be amplified here, however, remain constant: If something is to be a stimulus, it must clearly be a stimulus, and it must happen right now. If something is to be a response, it must clearly be a response to the stimulus immediately preceding it, and it must happen right now.

The “right now” phraseology is not incidental. You can imagine, I’m sure, how incredible it would be for a reader if the writer showed some strong stimulus, and then it took the other character hours or days to react. Something like:

(Stimulus) “I’m sorry, Frank. Your mother just died.”
(Response) Six hours later, Frank fainted with shock.

A perfectly believable response, if it hadn’t taken all that time to come.

To put all this another way, you can mess up stimulus-response transactions three ways:

1. You can show a stimulus and then show no external response (or perhaps one that doesn’t fit or doesn’t make sense);
2. You can show a character response when no stimulus (or no credible one) for it has been shown; or
3. You can put so much story time between stimulus and response that the logical relationship between the two events is no longer evident.

But what, you may ask, about those stimulus-response transactions which would make perfectly good sense if we just knew what the receiving character thought and felt before responding? In such cases, where the stimulus-response transaction is complicated, we must keep things clear for the reader by showing him the character’s internalization – the feeling-thought process that goes between the stimulus and the response.

If you stop to think about it, even the most obvious stimulus-response transaction requires some internal messaging in the mind and body of the receiver of the stimulus. Even if you touch something hot and jerk back instantly, what really happened was that a message went up your arm to some part of your brain – “Pain down here!” – and your brain sent a reflexive message back down the arm again – “Jerk away from it!”

Such simple transactions, of course, don’t need an explanation, any more than did Joe’s throwing the ball and Sam’s catching it. But the internalization process always takes place, and when things are complicated, you may need to remember that the pattern of every stimulus-response transaction – in deepest reality – is:

STIMULUS – INTERNALIZATION – RESPONSE

The rule being that you present the internalization to the reader – “play” it for him, if you will – when necessary to make an otherwise superficially incredible transaction understandable and credible.

One or two examples should show how this works.

Suppose you have the following in your manuscript:

(Stimulus) “Nancy,” the chairman said, “we have decided to make you a vice president of the firm!”

(Response) “Oh no!” Nancy said. “How could I have such bad luck!”

Now, assuming Nancy is your normal, ambitious, go-getting central figure, this negative response to a wonderful stimulus makes no sense at all. The reader reading such a transaction will be puzzled, and will probably stop believing the story right at this point.

What went wrong? Of course: The internalization that would explain Nancy’s strange response has been omitted. (It’s amazing how often writers assume that the transaction is clear when it is as puzzling as this one.)

What to do? Put in the internalization that explains things, like this:

(Stimulus) “Nancy,” the chairman said, “we have decided to make you a vice president of the firm!”

(Internalization) Nancy reeled with shock. She had come to this meeting expecting a demotion. Instead, they were offering her the job she had always dreamed of. But only an hour ago she had signed on with Acme Co., and could not go back on that contract. Just when she had everything she had ever wanted in her grasp, she had to leave Zilch Corp.

(Response) “Oh no!” Nancy said. “How could I have such bad luck!”

As clumsy and obvious as I have made this illustration for the sake of clarity, you can see how the process works. In a moment we can look at a brief excerpt which provides more complex examples.

Before doing that, however, an additional point should be made.

It’s possible that sometimes you the author might want the reader to be shocked and puzzled for a moment. You might want to create a surprising or even bizarre stimulus-response transaction as a means of creating momentary curiosity and/or suspense for the reader, planning to explain the internalization a few paragraphs or pages later. This is perfectly fine, but it’s an advanced technique; the fact that it’s done, sometimes for very special reasons, does not obviate the fact that stimulus, internalization and response ordinarily should be presented to the reader in their natural order. Writing them out of order can create big – or more subtle – problems.

Here’s another simple example:

Joe turned after hearing the gunshot.

What’s wrong with that? Grammatically, nothing whatsoever.

But consider: What was the stimulus? What was the response? In what order does the sentence present them?

That’s right. The sentence, in terms of stimulus and response, is backwards. It should read:

Hearing the shot, Joe turned.

I hope you’ll forgive me if I seem to beat this thing to death. Not only is a great deal of fiction-writing messed up at this very basic level; the principle of cause and effect, stimulus and response, lies at the heart of everything that follows in this book. As we shall see, you can’t write modern fiction scenes unless you understand and practice proper cause and effect; you can’t link scenes together unless you understand the same principle; and you can’t create a cohesive overall plot for your story or novel unless you can see the underlying dynamic of cause and effect which is at the heart of making your scenes not only link, but build with the kind of momentum and suspense that keeps readers worried – and fascinated.

Now, perhaps, we can turn to a more lengthy example which uses the basic stimulus-response techniques just discussed, but in a slightly more sophisticated way. The following is an edited excerpt from my latest novel involving a series character named Brad Smith. In this, part of chapter 35 of the novel titled Double Fault, we have just seen Brad being hit from behind and abducted from a motel-strip where his friend Collie Davis is also staying. The chapter changes to the viewpoint of Davis as he becomes aware of Brad’s abduction and enters into a chase.

Collie Davis hung up his cabin telephone. … Starting toward the door to give Brad the news, he heard (Stimuli) the sudden roar of a car engine being revved, then the nasty crunch of tires spinning in gravel. A sound like air gun pellets loudly peppered the front wall of his cabin.

(Response) “Maniac,” Davis muttered, cracking his front door to see who was playing destruction derby in the gravel parking area.

(Stimuli) A late-model Buick sedan, filthy with road dust, most of the bodywork on its right side smashed and dented, was just pulling out of the motel parking area onto the blacktop pavement, heading south out of the cloud of pale yellow dust it had just created. One of its wheels spun an instant on the asphalt, howling.

Davis got only a glimpse of the occupants, but it was enough. (Immediate motivating stimulus) Behind the wheel, a small bald man in a dark jacket. On the passenger side, slumped back against the seat’s headrest, Brad.

(Internalization) Unconscious or worse, judging by the way his head rolled to the side as the car veered fully onto the pavement and headed south.

(Response) Davis ducked back into his cabin. It took him perhaps ten seconds to grab his Browning out of the compartment in his suitcase and scoop up his car keys off the rustic bedside table.

Running outside to his rented Taurus, he glanced south and saw (Additional stimulus-information) that the Buick had already vanished around a slight turn in the highway where it started to ascend into the foothills. (Response) He grabbed his door handle and almost broke some fingers, forgetting he had locked up. (Stimulus-response pattern reversed in the previous sentence to portray Davis’s furious haste and confusion.) Getting the key in the lock and jumping inside took another few precious seconds. Backing out seemed to take an eternity.

(More response) Flooring the Taurus’s accelerator, he swung onto the pavement and headed in the direction the Buick had taken. (Response of onlookers to stimulus of Davis’s speeding car is now given, but again in reverse of the normal order to add to impression of speed and confusion.) Startled faces looked up from an open-air vegetable stand as he rocketed past them, the Ford’s transmission screaming in protest at such violent treatment. (Davis’s seeing the startled faces is a new stimulus to him, and he has an internalization:) All I need is for the town constable or somebody to arrest me for speeding, Davis thought.

(Stimulus) Reaching the curve where the Buick had vanished, (Response) he had to ease off a bit and allow the transmission to upshift. Then he poured power to the engine again, and it responded sweetly, the speedometer going up around 70.

(Stimulus) Ahead – well ahead, too far ahead – Davis could see the Buick nearing the outskirts of town, brake lights flaring brightly in the evening gloom, then swinging to the right and off the highway. (Response) He kept standing on the gas until he was almost on top of the place where the Buick had turned, seeing only at the last second that the intersecting road was gravel. (Stimulus) He swayed violently onto the gravel, half-losing it as the back end slewed around, (Response) then catching control again and pouring on more power. (Stimulus) The guy in the Buick with Brad had turned on his headlights, (Response) which made two nice red taillight signals for Davis to watch for. (Character intention) He kept his lights out to avoid detection if possible.

(Series of stimuli) The gravel road swung through a series of curves and came out in the deep canyon of a shallow river off to Davis’s left. He was having a bad time seeing the road in the dimness without headlights. A pale cloud of whitish powder put in the air by the Buick ahead didn’t help matters.

Sweat stung Davis’s eyes. (Internalization to complex of stimuli) He was walking a tightrope, and knew it: get too close, and the bald man would realize he was being followed and possibly kill Brad – if he hadn’t already done so; fall too far back in an overabundance of caution, on the other hand, and you could lose him altogether. Davis took several gravel curves in controlled drifts, and was rewarded with a glimpse of the Buick taillights well ahead. The bastard was driving like a maniac.

Which he probably was, Davis thought. Davis hadn’t had time to see much, but he had seen enough to know that the driver of the car ahead fit the sketchy description he had of the conspirator who was still at large.

(Character internalization continues, ruminating on other character’s motivations – story causes behind his immediate action-stimuli) What did he want with Brad? Revenge? If so, for what? Far more likely, he had learned somehow that Brad might know where Kevin Green was. But how could abducting Brad help the loony in any way – abduction being far and away the best Davis could assume this was?

Sheer red rock walls closed in tightly on the road, which had begun to get worse, narrower and washboarded by traffic and erosion. (Stimulus) Ahead was a tighter curve to the right around an outcropping of the hundred-foot rock face. (Response) Davis eased off a little and then swung wide into the turn. At the last possible instant (Stimulus) he spotted the yellow glare of headlights just around the bend somewhere. (Response) Jamming his weight hard on the brake, he spun the wheel and (Stimulus) felt for an instant that he was losing the Taurus altogether.…

Look at some of your own writing. Check very carefully to make sure that you are providing causes for desired effects, showing the effects of causes already in your copy. Look, too, at your smallest stimulus-response transactions:

• For every stimulus, do you show a response?
• For every response, have you provided an immediate, external stimulus?
• In complicated transactions, have you provided the reader with an explanatory internalization?
• Are the parts presented in the correct, textbook order, except when you want to connote confusion?

One final clarification. Throughout the part of this chapter dealing with stimulus and response, words like “external” and “physical” have been used with regularity. This was not an accident. Stimulus must be something on the stage in the story “now,” something (as mentioned earlier) that could be seen or heard or otherwise perceived with the senses of the audience if you were to put the transaction on a theater stage. Responses, too, must be external – physical.

If you were to write either of the following transactions, you would be dead wrong, and missing the point:

Having been angry for days, Joe punched Sam.

or:

Rick hit Bill. Bill was surprised.

Why are these stimulus-response transactions faulty? Because in the first case no stimulus was shown. What was shown was internal – inside Joe’s feelings, and it was not immediate; it was background that had been going on for quite some time. Joe was motivated by anger to hit Sam, but that doesn’t explain specifically why he hit him right then and there. He had no immediate, physical, external stimulus. In the second case, Bill’s surprise is not a response as we have defined response here; it is an internalization.

You may wish to go back and look again at the longer excerpt provided a bit earlier in this chapter. Note that – even in a wildly confusing sequence of events:

1. Nearly all the transactions are presented in the normal order.
2. Every transaction is completed – i.e., every stimulus brings on a response.
3. Internalization is caused by a stimulus; it doesn’t “just happen.”
4. Internalization is inserted in the proper order – after a stimulus and before the next response.
5. When transactions are presented out of their normal order, the effect on the reader is one of confusion.

It will be well for you to look hard at your own copy in these terms, too. If you find foggy logic, or get a bit confused in trying to repair obviously flawed transactions, try to think of cause as background or previously decided motivation; effect as the possibly complicated results of such background or motivation; stimulus as something much more immediate, in terms of time, and always in the outside world; response as also immediate and physical, and internalization as the process that goes on inside the receiver of a stimulus after that stimulus and before whatever response is to follow.

The more you work with this, the closer you will come to the first step in understanding scene and structure.

For one additional example of stimulus-response writing –

See Appendix 2.