Catalyst

causality--the inertia of story; characters behaving as they do because they are driven by their emotions, their beliefs, or their responses to dramatic events and other relevant pressures within a story. In many ways, the defining concepts of story and the American legal system are similar; each is propelled toward a decision, solution, allotment of judgment by some relevant precedent. The rules of procedure are based on what happened before, past events, past thinking, past behavior. In the law, this reliance on the causality of precedent is referred to as stare decisis. In dramatic narrative, the effect of precedent resides in backstory.

In a dramatic narrative, characters and concepts are in a steady condition of clash. It is not enough for two characters to confront one another with disagreement, each must reek and sound of his agenda to the point where the reader can sense its presence. Even if a character does something "Because I felt like it," the reader must be able to sense the plausibility of that character doing so. No amount of simple action for its own sake can cover up the lack of causality. Story with event but no causality is mere episode, inviting the adjective episodic.

A helpful mnemonic device for causality is the word "because." Story happens because someone wants something, because some one doesn't want something to happen, because in some field somewhere, an ox is being gored and because its owner is not going to let the matter pass.


Schrodinger’s cat—an existential conundrum proposed by the German physicist, Erwin Schrodinger to demonstrate the dual nature of matter; another useful, more literary-related way of looking at the famed Frank R. Stockton short story “The Lady or the Tiger”; an illustration of the role played by choice in fiction.

Schrodinger’s posited a cat is locked in a box, along with a radioactive atom that is connected to a vial containing cyanide. If the atom decays—and it surely will over time--it will open the vial. The cat, inhaling the cyanide fumes, will be killed.
When the box is closed the observer does not know if the atom has decayed or not. This means that the atom can be in both the decayed state and the non-decayed state at the same time. Therefore, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time - which clearly does not happen in classical physics.

The parallel between the cat and a given story is waiting to be drawn, so let’s draw it. When asked to list vital constituents of a dramatic incident (story), writers will supply such ingredients as character—“How can you have a story without character?”—and such other elements as plot, suspense, and reversal. It is the rare, thoughtful professional who will add one of the key qualities inherent in the fiction of the twenty-first century—ambiguity. (Odds are this metaphorical professional will have read the short fiction of Anton Chekhov, who dispensed with the heavy-handed moral or thematic finality of the short fiction of his contemporaries.

If we imagine story and Schrodinger’s cat to reside on opposing sides of the equal sign, we can “see” and "feel" the power of ambiguity in story. Fiction with the built-in element of duality provides an opening for reader participation, that condition where the reader feels not only close to the characters and events but becomes immersed in the outcome.

Since about 1902 (picked because James Joyce's Dubliners was published then), endings—conclusions, or payoffs—in fiction, particularly in the short form, have tended to move away from the highly visual, seemingly inescapable conclusion, drifting toward uncertainty, opaqueness, and choice. Some of this tendency can be related to the uncertainty of the times in which the stories are set; some of this tendency reflects a closer understanding of human affairs. When we consider the movement away from the fables of Aesop and, more recently, the short stories of O. Henry, we welcome Erwin Schrodinger and his ambiguous cat into the dramatic arena.

Coming to Terms

arc--the path or direction a story takes once it is set in motion. This useful term, its origins in geometry--a curved segment of a circle--helping it serve as a mnemonic device. Why is this so? The concept of "story line," also a traced path of the progress of a story, suggests the moment in medical thrillers when the patient dies and his vital responses flat line; thus a story line connotes a thin, even episodic progression of events, a story arc suggests layering, dimension, an orbital path, all constructs reminding the writer, the reader, and characters that story is multidimensional, multifarious, filled with implication, surprise, and the anarchic energy of impulse.

By its very shape, arc implies movement, the story being nudged, dragged, pushed, in some direction, both chronologically and in terms of pace. Helpful to writer, reader, and characters, arc allows each to see where the story has been, where it needs to go, and what further impediments may cross its path or, indeed, collide with it.

Two of the most important individuals in the writer's professional life, the literary agent and the editor, will frequently inquire about the arc of a story, by which they are asking where the story is going. Story arc is momentum informed by volition; it is episode injected with "because" or "as a consequence." Arc is a record of things done past in present because, and as a consequence.

arena--a place wherein story is the featured event; a locale for a scene or the entire story, its landscape never neutral, in fact frequently inhospitable. In some stories, the characters may not know they are in an arena, content to think of it merely as a place--perhaps not the optimal place nor even a good place, but not bad. The readers, however, understand. Why did Bobbie Ann Mason's iconic short story, "Shiloh," take place on the park grounds that were once the arena for one of the most fierce and bloody battles of the American Civil War? Was it mere accident that Allison Lurie named her protagonists the Tates for her darkly funny novel, The War between the Tates?

Arenas in story are famously located in bedrooms, offices, law courts, tennis courts, front seats of automobiles, back seats of automobiles, hospitals, supermarkets, Roman coliseums, anyplace where characters gather to explore and exploit their agendas. Wise writers have come to consider the settings for their scenes with the same care they use in selecting characters. If there is some plausible reason for including a particular scene in a story, its venue should be chosen with as much deliberation as the cast of characters is selected, allowing it's personality to have a tangible effect on the characters, whether a sneeze of allergy, a memory of a painful experience from the past, or a sense of discomfort and unwelcome.