Saunders describes reading student novels that churn their wheels endlessly, stuck in exposition, no escalation in sight. I’ve written a lot of stuff like that. It’s not enough that things keep happening. The things that happen need to build on each other and intensify, like a snowball growing in size and speed as it pursues some Looney Tunes character down a mountain.

The events also have to be connected. AKA, there needs to be causality . This is something I’d never considered before reading this book, which now seems kind of obvious in retrospect. I have absolutely been doing this wrong.

For most of us, the problem is not in making things happen (“A dog barked,” “The house exploded,” “Darren kicked the tire of his car”) but in making one thing seem to cause the next.

This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.

“The queen died, and then the king died” (E.M. Forster’s famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn’t mean anything. “The queen died, and the king died of grief” puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, means: “That king really loved his queen.”

Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.

This passage hit me with the force of a full-volume TikTok. Duh! Stories aren’t just events... they are connected events. Think about a mystery novel. We discover a clue, which leads us to a location, where we discover another clue. Maybe this is why mysteries are such a compelling format: they are yarn-balls of causality, down to the level of “what caused the crime??”

Justin • George Saunders on REVISION and CAUSALITY