Using Cause and Effect in Fiction

Half a string of Christmas lights refusing to turn on is one of life’s small but infuriating problems. You have to find exactly where the connection broke, or scrap the whole strand and start over.

But once you find the break, the fix is usually straightforward. Your plot works the same way. Each event needs to connect to the next, and when that connection breaks, the whole story goes sideways. Readers can feel it even though they can’t name it.

When this happens, you have a cause-and-effect problem.

Think of cause and effect as the connective tissue of your story. Conflict is the spine that keeps everything upright, and the central plot points are the bones. Without connective tissue linking them, the whole thing goes slack and the story loses its pull.

On the other hand, when the story has strong causality, each event produces conditions or a character makes a choice that makes the next event, the story flows smoothly.

A useful gut check: If you can remove a character’s choice from a scene and nothing changes, or if your plot points could be rearranged without affecting anything downstream, your causal chain needs work.

Take The Lion King. Here’s a version stripped of its causality:

There’s a stampede in a gorge. King Mufasa dies, and Scar takes over. Simba wanders into a jungle. He meets Timon and Pumbaa and has a good time. Years pass. The Pride Lands are dry and struggling. Nala appears in the jungle. Simba goes back home and becomes king.

All the events are there, in the right order. But in this version, they’re just things that happened. One doesn’t cause the next. And though the plot points are the same, the story is boring.

Now watch what changes when causality is restored:

The stampede happens inside a gorge with no escape routes, which is what makes Mufasa’s rescue attempt fatal. Scar convinces Simba he caused his father’s death, driving him to flee in shame. With no rightful ruler, Scar seizes power unchallenged. His exploitative rule drains the land, causing food scarcity severe enough that Nala ventures far from home to find Simba. She forces him to confront what he ran from, and Rafiki’s vision of his father breaks through his denial and compels him to return.

It’s the same story, but since each situation or character choices causes the next one, the events feel inevitable rather than assembled.

List your major plot points in order and ask two questions about each:

• What caused this event?
• What does this event cause?

If you can trace a “this happens because that happened” line through your story, you’re in good shape.

If you hit a moment where the explanation involves words like “coincidence,” “it just worked out,” or honestly, “I needed something dramatic here,” that’s a sign to revise.

Sometimes what you’ll find is that a scene exists because you wanted your character to experience something cool, not because anything in the story warranted it.

That’s a tough thing to discover about a chapter you love, but a scene that doesn’t grow from what came before and doesn’t cause what comes next is doing cosmetic work at best.

It either needs to go or needs to be reworked so it earns its place.

A strong causal chain makes your plot tighter and your characters feel real, because real people make choices that have consequences, and those consequences force new ones.

This changes how readers experience your characters. A protagonist things happen to reads as passive, someone the plot is dragging around by the collar. A protagonist whose choices create the plot feels alive. Readers root harder for characters who are genuinely driving toward something, especially when their own decisions are making the road harder.

And when you get the chain right, something almost magical happens to your pacing. Scenes stop feeling like stops on a tour and feel like falling dominoes, causing readers to pick up speed because they sense the momentum, taking them all the way to a satisfying ends.

So trace your chain, find the breaks, and reconnect them or cut what can’t be saved just like a string of Christmas lights, and once you do, your story will shine brightly.

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I’d love to hear from you. Comment below using any of these prompts to guide you:

• What questions do you have?
• When’s the last time you cut a scene because it was cool but didn’t actually earn its place in the story?
• Try the two-question test on your current WIP: what caused this scene, and what does it cause? Where did it get shaky?
• Do you outline your causal chain before you draft or find it in revision?