A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-Three-Hundred-And-Twenty-Three

I think that it is essential, in my way of understanding a story, to get into the question of how the relationship between cause and effect is established and just what I mean by this.  I would say that there is a certain character to a story, and I tend to think a lot of that comes down to the nature of how actions are resolved, to what the tone of those things is, for example.  In a comic novel, for example, we might find that an action leads, quite often, to the most absurd and improbably outcomes, while in a novel with a more serious tone, the outcomes would tend to veer towards less outlandish outcomes.  The causes can often be quite similar, but the ways they are resolved, the nature of how actions impact the world, are what changes to create the specifics of a fictional world's character and general nature.  It is through how the world responds to the characters actions that we discover just what kind of reality they are inhabiting, and, thus, what kind of story is being told.

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