As a discussion and investigation spinning-off from the AutoBlurb series, I'll post some thoughts on plot.
The ultimate idea is for this to be useful to writers, of text games and of fiction; but the approach will be to look at it from all angles.
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posted Nov 8, 2008 6:46 PM by Conrad Cook
There's an important point I've overskipped in the last post: namely, how we know cause and effect when we see it.
In fact, this is a philosophically tricky point, which people are still discussing: but the shady, blurry cases of cause and effect can be especially interesting to dramatists. The kind of stories that people keep talking about -- the movie conversation in the diner; the novel in the coffeeshop -- generally have arguable points to be made about cause and effect:
Why did this character do that thing? That's cause and effect, but it's important because it's about character.
(-- and in light of our prior post, we can expect that people will want to look at such a question in terms of the action's raw materials, the purpose it was geared toward, the logic that governs that kind of action, and what immediate circumstances motivated it.)
The reasoning process by which we recognize cause and effect is called induction, and it's a tricky, flawed reasoning process. A clever fellow named John Stuart Mill said that these are the cases when we recognize cause and effect at work:
- When we see A, we see X; when we don't see A we don't see X. So, A causes X.
- When we see A, we don't see X; when we see A, we don't see X. So, A blocks X.
- More A and more X; less A and less X. So, A causes X.
- More A and less X; less A and more X; So, A blocks X..
- A, B, and C occur with X, Y and Z; we know B causes Y and C causes Z; So, A causes X.
--You can look up Mill's Methods on Wikipedia, or indeed find his work online. I've kept pretty close to Mill, but I've done a few things differently: Mill doesn't talk about blocking, as I recall; and yet, blocking -- causing to be inhibited -- is in its own right important to pay attention to.
So, these are the rules that govern the fine mechanics of cause and effect for your audience: Ophelia was not upset before talking to Hamlet; after talking to Hamlet she is upset; so, talking to Hamlet has upset her. That's a digital form of reasoning, which you might glean from reading the script; but watching a performance, presumably you could expect to see Ophelia getting progressively more upset the more she talks to Hamlet.
Quite often, writers will use this kind of thinking to layer in meaning which the audience will respond to without necessarily identifying: in the way a musical illiterate like me can enjoy musical structure without understanding it, people have a sense of cause and effect: and they will respond to cause and effect even if they couldn't sit down and explain it to you.
For example, in The Sun Also Rises, the psychobabe of the story enters the story at the same moment two gay men do: she ushers in the sexual perversity which will be so important to the story.
Next up - we'll talk about variations in situation as being like variations on a theme in music. Half-recognizing one situation in another, especially when they are causally connected, is a fundamental function of our narrative sense.
Conrad.
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posted Oct 27, 2008 2:59 PM by Conrad Cook
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updated Oct 27, 2008 5:10 PM
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Aristotle got us into looking at plot as a chain of events related through cause and effect; so let's see what Aristotle has to say about causality.
As moderns, we're used to thinking in terms of scientific cause and effect: physical-reality stuff. But Aristotle didn't divide the world up the same way we do.
He looked at four types of cause: the material cause; the formal cause; the efficient cause; and the final cause.
- The Material Cause - What is the thing made of?
If a thing is made of a substance, then without the substance we can't have the thing. A house is made of wood, so to build a house we need to work with wood; a drama is made of words, so to make a drama we need to work with words.
As you can see, material cause is not just about the physical material, but rather about the parts which a thing is made of.
- The Formal Cause - What are the rules that govern this thing?
By understanding the rules which govern something's nature, we come to understand why it is the way it is. Understanding the formal restrictions of poetry help us understand why a poem has the form it has. So the formal cause is about the logic which governs a thing.
- The Efficient Cause - Through what impulse did the thing come into being?
This is what we understand today as the cause; what agency, through what impulse, generated the thing?
- The Final Cause - What is the thing's purpose?
In some ways, the modern person will object to this category even existing: it isn't a purpose that causes a thing; it's the forces that act on it to make it what it is.
But Aristotle is on to something here: people take action with purposes in mind; most things man-made have a clear purpose. Even most things animals make have a purpose: A spider's web wouldn't exist if the spider didn't need to catch flies.
But also, without a materialistic world-view, Aristotle was seeing purposes elsewhere. The purpose of a hand is clearly to grasp: it is what it is because of that purpose. With neither the idea that evolutionary forces of natural selection shaped hands over many generations, nor the idea that a creator-god sculpted hands to be suited to that function, it was nevertheless clear to Aristotle that hands are shaped the way they are shaped because of the work they are meant to do.
So, without accepting that it must apply to everything we talk about, clearly many things are as they are because there is some purpose they are suited for.
To recap, then, the causes of a thing are:
- The parts it is made of;
- The logic which governs it;
- The impulse that generated it; and,
- The purpose for which it is suited.
So, to ask what are the causes of an event in a story, we ask four questions:
What are the parts of an event?
An event has some number of characters (in rare cases, zero); it has some kind of setting; possibly there are important objects present; there is some action taking place -- someone or something is doing something, usually, and there are categories of action we might be interested in-- fighting, helping, talking (persuading, negotiating, hinting), not talking, moving, and so on; this amounts to the situation; and there is a change in the situation, and this change in a situation is what we call an event.
What is the logic that governs an event?
Each change has its own logic; to speak of events broadly, any event in a story is specific; it is particular; it is this that happens, and not something else; this happens instead of something else; characters in the situation see it each from their own point of view, and evaluate it by their own rules and according to their own agendas; the characters have been cooperating or contesting with one another, for the same or different reasons; they explicitly or implicitly choose to continue their strategies as the situation changes.
What is the impulse that generated an event?
An event comes out of some situation and some action: which need to be sufficiently understood by the audience that we do not reject the event happening. Not all of the causally-important events need to be witnessed by the audience; that's not ultimately possible, as it would include too much; but usually the most important, which is to say those with the greatest effect, are those we witness; contributing events are outlined, reported, glimpsed, or hinted at; background events, which represent the status-quo, can be assumed.
Equally, we want to keep in mind that, just as this event came out of a prior event or set of events, so it will contribute to later events.
What is the purpose of the event?
There is your, the storyteller's, purpose in choosing to have this happen rather than something else; but that's not the question.
If an event is a situation plus at least one action, then each action will reflect some purpose on the part of the actor. When we say a character has a purpose, we mean there is some situation that he has in mind which he wants to come about. The situation of this event, then, might be the result, or partially the result, of a character's intentions; and if it is, it presumably is useful or inherently desirable to that character (or he believed it would be when he set about to make it happen).
Using All This
Strongly-plotted stories tend to have characters with well-defined goals and motivations; the situation changes a great number of times; it changes in varied ways -- not just, 'oh, no! Someone else has the bag of money; let's chase them,' which gets quickly boring, but, 'oh, no! I didn't realize I was trading the bag of money for the car keys.'
Well-plotted stories are not necessarily deep or meaningful, but just as spectacle plays to our built-in sense of the awesome and the beautiful, and music plays to our built-in sense of sound, plot plays to our built-in sense of cause and effect. As in any other medium, good plot takes place in the zone between the predictable and the entirely unexpected: it is predictable enough that we can appreciate the surprises.
The enjoyable thing in well-plotted stories is mostly in the hidden-in-plain-sight effect: We understand the current situation, but we don't understand all of its ramifications, and when someone takes an action which is unexpected, but obvious in retrospect, or when we're suddenly reminded that we'd been predicting an outcome on a premise we knew was false -- that part, the 'Oh, yeah!' chess-game part, is the fun part.
(Conversely, when something happens we the audience couldn't have predicted, no matter how deeply we thought on it -- a character turns colors; the cavalry arrives; or so on -- it may be satisfying in some way; but it is not satisfying to our built-in sense of cause-and-effect, because the cause is not priorly available to us.)
Up Next: Non-C-E dimensions to plot
Conrad. |
posted Oct 26, 2008 8:19 AM by Conrad Cook
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updated Oct 27, 2008 9:24 AM
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Most basically, plot is the arrangement of events that tell a story; in order to be unified in one story, the events have something in common: they talk about the same people, the same situation, or the same kind of situation; they share a cause; they share an effect.
Traditionally, strongly-plotted events lead to one another through cause and effect. (This is a modern framing of Aristotle.) So, the job of the storyteller is to describe each new event, such that it is in itself sufficiently understood, that the audience understands why it happened, and such that its effect on the story is clear. Delaying these points, or taking care of them subtly while the audience's attention is focussed elsewhere, can be part of a deliberate storytelling strategy, but they probably can't be omitted in the working-through of a good plot.
So, we should look into the nature of an event, and the nature of cause and effect. Let's ask first, though, whether there are times when well-plotted stories can be told without events connected through cause and effect:
Events which are too tightly connected via cause and effect lead to a sense of inevitability, which may or may not be the desired effect. Stories where each event seems likey to follow its preceeding event will not have that sense of inevitability (or not from the event chain); and even less so those where events could possibly follow preceeding events. None of these are inherently better than another, but they have different effects and will be variably suitable to any particular story.
For example, a tragedy where the final catastrophe inevitably results from the first event has a different effect than one where the final catastrophe is the consequence of bad luck, or a missed gamble, or a choice; likewise in a comedy. In a comedy or a tragedy, the important thing is that the effect is suitable to the story and the subject.
There are forms of storytelling that eschew cause-and-effect entirely, or nearly entirely. They'll tend toward incoherence: the trick in such a story is to make a virtue of incoherence, for example by presenting the world as mad, or as inherently absurd.
Overall, the manner in which events follow one another, whether guided by rigid cause-and-effect, by probabilities, by whimsy, or by no discernable pattern, defines and conveys the nature of the story's world. Far more important than the question of whether the world is a sad or happy place is the question of whether the world is managably happy or sad; and this question, and others like it, are answered by the manner in which events lead to one another.
Conrad.
Next, let's look at the nature of events and cause and effect.
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