Imagine, for a moment, the tale of Johnny Protagonist. Johnny is the son of a great martial artist, and is determined to uphold his father’s legacy. With a grand tournament approaching, Johnny sees his chance for glory at last, and trains hard to perfect the skills his father once instilled in him. In round after round, Johnny demonstrates cunning and courage, deftly defeating his opponents with one after another of his father’s legendary techniques. At last, Johnny reaches the final round, and faces off with the student of his father’s old rival. At this point, Johnny pulls a pointy hat out of his gi, says “I was actually a wizard this whole time,” and turns his opponent into a newt.

In your mind, does Johnny’s tale qualify as a satisfying story? If expanded to the length of a novel or television series, would you feel like Johnny’s wizard reveal was a meaningful payoff for the time you’ve invested in this character, and the challenges you’ve seen them overcome? Do you feel satisfied by that relationship between exertion and result, and are you sufficiently hooked on Johnny’s world to wish to follow his continuing adventures?

Buckle up, folks. Today we’re talking narrative and consequence.

A story is more than a series of events that happen. Untethered from cause and consequence, a series of events is simply data, information without perspective or intent. To instill impartial data with the heat of drama and the thrum of momentum, a great deal more work is needed: characterization, perspective, structure, etcetera. But most fundamentally, the events of your narrative must to some degree obey the laws of consequence, preceding from established beginnings towards inevitable endings, and justifying your audience’s continued investment all along the way.

So what does it mean to write with consequence in mind? Take the tale of Johnny Protagonist. Up until the final act of his story, each event in his narrative naturally precipitates, even implies the event that would follow it. Johnny inherits a grand legacy from his father, instilling in him a desire to prove himself. As a result, when a chance for such validation arrives, Johnny naturally chooses to compete. Each round of the tournament serves as a fulfillment of his initial goal, all building towards a natural and preordained victory… and then something else happens, which was in no way precipitated by the preceding events, and which connects in no way to the drama as it is being presented.

That last moment there is when Johnny’s tale shifts from a chain of consequences to a series of events – the precise moment it stops being a coherent story. This transition shifts it into something you might call “Free Association Storytelling,” wherein events simply occur without reason or foreshadowing. In such stories, narrative developments aren’t inevitable consequences of prior acts or character emotions – they simply happen, undercutting any ability for audiences to understand or believe in the ongoing drama. Such stories actually become less investment-worthy as they go on, and the lack of any connective tissue between component parts is fully revealed.

In contrast, a story built on a fundamental respect for consequence stacks inevitability upon inevitability, establishing a foundation of characters, motives, and scenarios that will guide the drama through roughly preordained thresholds, rather than simply being led through a series of unmediated plot events. Every single story involves making a series of promises to the reader, tiny pleas of “don’t worry, we’re going somewhere with this, and it’ll all pay off in the end.” Every time you fulfill such a promise, your audience feels that much more emotionally aligned with your narrative – and every time you break one, your ability to pay off what you’re promising is called into question.

That explanation still feels a bit more philosophical than practical, so let’s get into how consequence is expressed through craft. On a moment-to-moment or scene-to-scene level, writing with consequence in mind means ensuring that every action in your narrative is followed by a coherent reaction, each choice naturally implying its response. You can conceptualize this as connective tissue between sentence clauses: your story’s actions should be connected by clauses like “resulting in” or “in response,” rather than the sterile, unmoored “and then.” This Happens and then This Happens and then This Happens is a series of events, not a story. This Happens, resulting in This Happening, forcing This Response is a narrative, a causal chain that audiences can naturally cling to, and even begin to predict.

On a macro level, respecting consequence means sculpting your world and narrative with consistency, foresight, and purpose. Stable worldbuilding, consistently evolving characterization, and clear narrative consequences are all necessary tools for making audiences believe a world or story has genuine substance to it, that it is more than just free-associated words on a page. The more your audience can parse your drama as the inevitable repercussions of specific characters interacting, the more they will invest in that drama and those characters. If done successfully, this ultimately results in a positive feedback loop of audience investment, with each payment of emotional payoff ensuring a greater audience investment on the next loop.

If you consider your own experiences with your favorite stories, you can likely pinpoint a variety of moments when you felt the satisfaction of your belief in the text being paid off with a coherent (yet still potentially surprising) narrative result. Audiences want to experience “ah, of course” moments in both a positive and negative sense, whether they’re cheering for a character’s skillful rise or lamenting their inevitable self-destruction. They want to feel attuned to the story they’re reading, and maintaining that sense of attunement demands making a pact with the reader that the world and drama as it has been initially conceived will continue to obey the rules of its formation.

Ultimately, many of the greatest thrills of engaging with fiction can only be realized in stories that have already proven their respect for consequence. There is a specific pleasure that comes from truly getting to know characters, to the point where their actions don’t just drive the narrative, but also consistently validate the audience’s understanding of their nature. To take one example, the best long-form situational comedies understand that lasting humor comes not from the brief diversion of random surprises, but from the endlessly rewarding interplay of compelling, consistent characters bouncing off one another, and illustrating how their familiar personalities interact with some episode’s novel dramatic intrusion.

For more directed, evolving narratives, the necessity of writing with consequence dovetails neatly with the importance of “seeding” concepts and conflicts, of laying groundwork such that no major twists feel like they’re emerging from nothing at all. The more significant a later reveal will be, the more important it is to provide some sort of hint or premonition of that development, that the audience may feel this was all part of the grand design. It is a tricky alchemy to surprise your audience without disappointing them, and exploiting what might be disregarded as scenic texture in order to prophesize about later developments is one of the most crucial tools in your arsenal. Heck, for ongoing narratives with no clear endpoint, you can even exploit this technique retroactively; simply look back on your narrative for details that might invite clarification or further conflict, and align your future developments such that those details now seem prophetic in retrospect.

Whatever the terms of your narrative, the underlying cruciality of writing with consequence endures. Even fantastical variables still obey narrative logic; you may be writing a story about fairies and minotaurs, but unless you imbue those fairies and minotaurs with stable qualities and coherent personalities, your audience will have nothing to hold onto. Fortunately, the reverse is also true: you can make your story as fantastical as you like, but if the bones are strong, the audience will surely stay with you. Ultimately, internalizing the lessons of narrative consequence actually frees your imagination: the better you become at keeping your narrative promises, the freer you are to challenge audiences with the scope and singularity of your vision.

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