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Most people have a pretty simple view of the world—even people who are otherwise trained to know better. And that view of the world is based on cause and effect.
Cause and effect says that if you want to know why anything happens, you just need to look for a “root cause.”
Several techniques have been developed over the years to do this, including one of the most popular called “The 5 Whys.”
Applying it is easy: for anything you want to understand, you keep asking “Why did this happen?” until you either get to an “obvious” cause or you start going in circles.
But there’s a problem.
Because most things that happen in the world aren’t that straightforward.
Science knows this and it tries to cheat.
We get “probable cause” which is really trying to assign some implicit or explicit probability with an event occurring…
…or we get “systemic causation” which is a way to say that there’s more than one cause.
But either way, we’re faced with the reality that simple cause and effect isn’t good enough to describe why things happen in the real world.
So why would it be good enough to explain things in your story?
Formally speaking, cause and effect says that the cause is both necessary and sufficient for the effect to occur.
That means there’s no other thing required other than the single cause…
…and if that cause is present…
…then you get the effect.
It’s guaranteed.
And if it isn’t?
Then we can’t be dealing with cause and effect. It must be something else.
And it turns out…
…that “something else” is one of the most important levers of control you can wield in your story.
Once you understand it, you unlock the key to making entirely believable stories, no matter if there’s aliens, dragons or superpowers.
There is a relationship we can lean on from science to talk about this, and it’s called “producer-product.”
It’s similar to cause and effect with one key difference.
Each producer is necessary…
…but none alone are sufficient to actually produce the effect.
Change any one of them – even slightly – and you can get an entirely different outcome.
Now do you see the power you can have?
Don’t like where things are going, you now have a way to find the easiest, most logical thing to change that will get you there.
And it turns out that this leads you to the question on Page 7 of the Breakthrough Scene Blueprint:
What would have to be true for the outcome I want to be inevitable?
Answer that, and you unpack the true levers of your story.
But don’t just take my word for it, go back, grab your copy of the Blueprint, and look at your breakthrough scene again.
What would happen if you changed just one thing?
Will it help or hurt your story?
Does it get you where you want to go faster?
Does it legitimately “raise the stakes” of the story?
Is it more aligned with the reality you’ve created so far?
All these questions and more are obvious once you realize there’s more to the world than simple cause and effect…
…and it’s one of the biggest “secrets” inside the Perpetual Story System™ and it’s approach to creating stories with a soul.
So, if you’d like to see the implications of going beyond cause and effect for your story…
…then just make sure you grab your copy of the Breakthrough Scene Blueprint right here:
To unlocking your story’s soul,
ast
—
Andrew S. Townley
Creator of the Perpetual Story System™