Plot a storyline in which every choice causes something

You can come up with three interesting events without having a story. Each part may be absolutely fascinating, but why do they actually follow one another? If the only answer is “and then,” you have a collection of events, not a plot.

Plotting a storyline is often explained as coming up with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That helps you organize your story, but it doesn’t help with the connection between the events. A plot only gets its power when characters’ choices create problems that they then have to solve. In other words: what first seemed like a solution becomes the next obstacle.

Example: A woman hides a letter saying that her father has to confirm by Friday that he wants to rent a new apartment. She doesn’t want him to move. Because he never gets the letter, he doesn’t respond in time, and the apartment goes to someone else. When he calls the landlord, he learns that the letter was in fact delivered. He asks his daughter, who always sorts the mail, what happened to it. Now she has to choose: tell him she hid the letter, or let her father believe it got lost.

In the writing exercise below, you don’t write a synopsis or a finished story, but you do build a small chain of cause and effect. You should be able to point out why the second event wouldn’t happen without the first. And why the third wouldn’t happen without the second.

Read the assignment below. At the bottom, you can submit all three of your passages at once for feedback on the four criteria.

All you have to do is paste your text into the widget at the bottom of this page and click “Review my exercise.” You don’t need an account.

Intermediate exercise: Three attempts, a bigger problem each time

Write three consecutive passages of about 120 words each about one character who is trying to solve a concrete problem. In passage 1, the character makes a choice that helps in the short term but causes a new problem. In passage 2, the character tries to solve that new problem and makes the situation more complicated. In passage 3, the character is forced into a choice that wouldn’t have been necessary at the start. Don’t use random disasters, unexpected inheritances, or strangers who come to the rescue to move the chain forward. From one passage to the next, keep the cause and effect visible in the action itself. Put a number above each passage.

• Length: 3 × about 120 words
• Time: 1 hour

Learning Objective

Practice building a causal storyline in which one character’s decisions produce the next problems and the stakes gradually change.

Criteria

• Cause: each new problem is clearly the result of an earlier choice, not just the next event.
• Agency: the character makes their own decisions, and those decisions determine how the storyline develops.
• Escalation: the consequences become harder and harder to avoid, or they demand a tougher choice.
• Coherence: together, the three passages form one chain the reader can follow, without needing a story that isn’t on the page to explain it.

Now write three consecutive passages of about one hundred twenty words each. Make sure every attempt to find a solution causes the next problem.

Paste the three passages one after the other into the widget. ViaScripta looks at cause, agency, escalation, and coherence. You don’t need an account.

Also check out the other writing exercises on ViaScripta.