Suppose a Tree Fell in a Forest

When you start a story, you are using variables relative to your personality and, it must be said, your potential for impatience, to set multiple outcomes in motion, from which you attempt to select the outcome most suitable to your mood at the onset of the concept.

To call something an event means you can visualize one or more occurrences taking place within a setting. In some degree of probability, you have expectations for the event, emotions connected with its initiation, duration, form, and conclusion.

A number of variables attach themselves to an event yet to take place or one still in progress. Still other variables can be attached to an event that has come to an end. One of the more enduring qualities of an event is the perspective or point of view from which it is observed. 

Of course the possibility exists for an event to take place where there is no one, avian, animal, human, or, for that matter, insect to view and filter the event.

A particularly delicious argument relative to this last sort of event, the one taking place with no human to witness it, has the event taking place within a philosophy class, where various aspects of event are deconstructed along with their consequences. A tree falling in a forest may or not be heard, depending on, among other things, the relationship of the sound to a human, but if the tree falls within the framework of a philosophy or logic class, it has consequences.

The same falling tree, should it land on an unwary beaver, has consequences on the beaver. Were it to fall on a rabbit, you'd be among the first to suggest splitting hares, which would be your way of taking down the matters of philosophy relative to trees falling in peopled or unpopulated forests and turning the conversation toward the intended goal of point of view or perspective.

You're willing to concede certain temporal attributes to an event, such as one in the planning stage, where the outcome may be hoped for but at a certain amount of risk. Some events can be pretty straightforward: Boil some water, for instance.  Many in the audience will understand your intention to raise the temperature of water from whatever it is now to either one hundred centigrade degrees or 212 Fahrenheit ones, with the proviso that the water to be heated is done to at sea level.

Some events involve the proposed time for a speech to be presented, a play to be performed, a meal to be served, a ceremony to be initiated. You enjoy such speculations because they for a time cause you to see story and dramatic consequences as having scientific attributes. 

Character A has expectations of a profitable outcome after he executes the act of robbing a particular bank. Character B has expectations of his proposal of marriage to Character C once he has presented the proposal. Character D has expectations of finding his favorite beach cove empty when he ventures there with a shade umbrella, a picnic lunch, and a thermos of coffee.

Within any specific setting, a wide range of events are possible, which you will now designate as the R (for range) factor. those events, either singular or multiple, can produce a wide range of outcomes, which you will now designate as O. Thus E is to R as O is to E, but the matter does not have to end there because there is no limit to possibilities or their outcomes. You do not have to know proportions or ratios to recognize the potential in a given set of circumstances, for a concept and, the potentials of the concept to morph its way into a viable story line.

Even though your methods for composition use events, the more thwarted the better, as a way of arriving at awareness of a story arch, you are not always so clear as you'd like to be. Having what seems as pure Aristotelian logic make great sense; you have neither that kind of mind nor its ambition. Story has to pay some attention to logic, but it has to pay greater concerns toward the emotions of doubt, puzzlement, bewilderment, darkness, and envy.