Most Common Writing Mistakes: Poor Cause and Effect

As creators of story worlds, authors are privileged with a certain amount of inside information. We almost always know what’s going to happen to the characters before an event actually occurs. We understand cause and effect intuitively. The readers and the main character might not have seen that left hook coming from the antagonist, but we authors saw the bad guy sneaking up on the protagonist long before his actions manifested themselves on the page.

The Effect of Jumbled Cause and Effect

Because of this inside information, it’s all too easy to confuse readers by showing the effect of an action, before showing the cause. Consider the following example:

Cora opened the window to yell at her son. He stood next to the fire hydrant across the street, even though she’d told him about a million times to stay in the yard.

At the beginning of this paragraph, readers have no idea why Cora is yelling. They don’t know her son is across the road, anymore than they know Cora had instructed him to stay in the yard. Here’s an even more subtle example of this transposition:

Cora jumped and whirled around when the fire hydrant exploded.

Readers see Cora jump, but they have no idea why she jumped.

Why Is Poor Cause and Effect Even a Problem?

At first glance, this may seem like a niggling problem. After all, readers have only to read to the end of the sentence to discover why Cora reacted as she did. But by transposing events, even momentarily, you’re blocking readers’ view of the story.

In his article “3 Secrets to Great Storytelling” (Writer’s Digest, January 2011), thriller author Steven James explains:

As a fiction writer, you want your reader to always be emotionally present in the story. But when readers are forced to guess why something happened (or didn’t happen), even for just a split second, it causes them to intellectually disengage and distances them from the story. Rather than remaining present alongside the characters, they’ll begin to analyze or question the progression of the plot. And you definitely don’t want that.

Often, writers show the effect before the cause out of simple negligence. Because we know what’s happened, the lapse in linearity doesn’t present any confusion for us.

Don’t Confuse Poor Cause and Effect With “Creating Suspense”

Some authors will go further by purposely transposing cause and effect in a mistaken attempt to create suspense:

Elliot stared in shock. This couldn’t be happening. If only he’d known, he might have prevented it. Heart pounding, he sank to the curb. In front of him, police cars surrounded his brother’s crumpled Camry.

This technique works only in a rare handful of instances (chapter beginnings occasionally being one of them). More often the not, the result is reader frustration over your refusal to share the information the characters are receiving as they receive it.

If you can strengthen your narrative by showing a logical progression of cause and effect, you’ll end up with leaner prose, more honest character reactions, and more involved readers.

>>Click here to read more posts in the Most Common Writing Mistakes Series.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you handle cause and effect in your writing? Tell me in the comments!

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