Working with a client this week I was reminded of a storytelling principle that might sound basic, but is really foundational – and helpful at every step of the writing process.
First, a little context: This week’s client is reworking the outline for an animated feature. She’s been through a few iterations of the story, and so she has a bunch of great stuff she loves. But holding onto specific scenes and moments and details can make re-breaking the story tricky.
And as we worked through it, the principle that we kept coming back to is this: most good stories are built on a single, primary cause-and-effect pathway.
(Yes, there’s a special class of story that specifically uses multiple cause-and-effect pathways that – usually – merge at some point. Think Crash, Traffic, Babel, etc. These are much less common, in their own category, and not really what we’re talking about today… although the idea of cause-and-effect can still be found in these stories.)
Finding the cause-and-effect pathway
So my client and I set aside everything else and worked on finding that cause-and-effect pathway first. It’s like making sure the skeleton is in place to hold up the body, before adding on the muscle and flesh and skin.
And, indeed, sometimes this pathway is called the “spine” of the story. You’ve heard that before. So it isn’t a new concept, but it’s worth revisiting (as the basics always are).
When you’re breaking story, you can start with the big picture, 40,000-foot view cause-and-effect first.
Like in A Quiet Place, the major plot points are:
- The youngest son is killed by a monster (Inciting Incident), so
- The family must stick together and rely on each other to survive in this dangerous new world (Break into Act 2), so
- When mom goes into labor (Midpoint), the family deploys a careful plan to keep her safe but it requires them to be in separate locations, so
- Dad then ventures out to find the kids and get them back to safety (Break into Act 3), which leads to
- Dad sacrificing himself so the kids can make it back to mom, where together they figure out how to kill the monsters and live to fight another day.
As we’ve talked about so many times before, you can then zoom in, getting more and more granular, and find the cause-and-effect at each level of story, i.e. in each act, in each sequence, in each scene.
Why do we like to see cause and effect in stories?
We like clear cause-and-effect in stories because we’re always searching for meaning. We like stories that show us why. And cause and effect shows us why, which is satisfying to our meaning-seeking brains. That meaning gives the story resonance. We connect with it on a deeper level.
This week, my challenge to you is to think about your current project and see whether there’s a clear cause-and-effect pathway that takes us from beginning to end.
And – because, tools not rules – if you don’t have a single cause-and-effect pathway, is that a deliberate choice, and is it effective in your screenplay?