Build Causes, Not Just Calendars

“In 1998 we moved to the house on Alder Street. In 1999 my father changed jobs. In 2000 my sister left for college. In 2001 the maple in the yard came down in a storm.” The paragraph comes from a memoir chapter that does not exist, written to show a pattern. Every sentence is true, and every sentence is placed correctly in time, but none of them needs the next or explains it. A reader will register the dates and wait for the point.

E. M. Forster drew the line in Aspects of the Novel (1927). A story, he says, is a narrative of events arranged in time sequence, and a plot is also a narrative of events, but with the emphasis on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story; “the king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. Of the queen’s death, in a story we ask “and then?” and in a plot we ask “why?” He adds that a plot demands intelligence and memory from the reader, where a story asks only for curiosity. By his line, the Alder Street paragraph is a story.

Aristotle got there long before. He says in the Poetics (in the Butcher translation) that reversals and recognitions should arise from the internal structure of the plot, so that what follows is the necessary or probable result of what came before, and that it makes all the difference whether an event is a case of propter hoc or post hoc: because of this, or merely after it. Practice 47 looks at the example he gives in the following chapter of the Poetics, the messenger in the Oedipus. Here we need only his test. Is each step made by the last, or merely placed after it?

A writer who stays faithful to what happened, or to the order it occurred to the character, may end up with a sequence in which any section could be moved without consequence. That turns up in memoir and history as well as fiction, and in argument too, where the claims stand in a row like a list of things the author knows.

When McPhee profiled Thomas Hoving, then director of the Metropolitan Museum, his notes in birth-to-present order did not accommodate the themes, such as forgery, that ran through Hoving’s life. He built the piece instead as portraits arranged in two converging arms, personal and professional, designed to ask how an unpromising youth, expelled from Exeter for slugging a teacher, became the head of a great museum. The arms meet in two very long paragraphs, and McPhee says the second one answers the question. “Or was meant to,” he adds.

In argument the test is old and simple. A claim is supported by reasons, and a reason is what follows “because.” In the framework of Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb and Joseph Williams’s The Craft of Research, reasons sit between a claim and the evidence that supports them. If a section of a book cannot be tied to its neighbor by “because” or “therefore,” the reader gets an assertion followed by another assertion.

The maxim is conditional. In a plot, an essay with an argument, or a case study, causality matters, and in some forms it does not. A diary is a calendar by design, and a day-in-the-life piece promises a day. An oral history, a lyric essay assembled by association, or a poem that proceeds by image owes the reader a different kind of connection. Ask whether the reader has been promised an explanation and handed only a sequence.

Causality can also be forced, and then you have a different falsehood, the tidy biography in which nothing was accidental. Some structures keep coincidence in and call it coincidence. Forster himself allows a plot with a mystery, in which the cause is withheld until late: the queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief. The cause arrives, but the reader learns it in an order that is not the order of events.

Practice. List your major events or claims, in the order they currently appear. Between each adjacent pair, write either “because” or “therefore” and finish the sentence. Where you can only write “and then,” mark it. A marked gap may need a cause supplied, or the unit cut or moved, or you may decide that the pair is deliberately episodic and know why; a mark means only that the question has been asked, and the answer need not be causal. Thirty minutes will cover a chapter. When you finish, count the marks, so you know how many decisions you owe the draft.