What Is Cause and Effect in a Plot?
Quick answer: Cause and effect in a plot means every event grows from the one before it. Why 'therefore' beats 'and then', with examples and a revision method.
Cause and effect in a plot is the principle that each event should happen because of the previous event, not merely after it. A plot is a chain, not a list: the argument causes the walkout, the walkout causes the missed call, the missed call causes the disaster. E. M. Forster's classic formulation is that 'the king died and then the queen died' is a story, but 'the king died, and then the queen died of grief' is a plot. The word doing the work is because.
This is the single most reliable test for whether a draft has a plot or just a sequence. Readers may not analyse causation, but they feel its absence as randomness and its presence as momentum. Causally linked events also carry meaning automatically, because they show a world in which actions have consequences, which is most of what fiction quietly teaches.
The longer answer: therefore and but, never and then
A practical formulation used in many writers' rooms says that scenes should connect with 'therefore' or 'but', never with 'and then'. She lied to the inspector, therefore the inspector checked the ledger, but the ledger had been altered, therefore suspicion fell on the clerk. Each link is a small combustion driving the next. When scenes connect only with 'and then', the story becomes episodic, and each new event has to generate interest from scratch instead of inheriting it.
Causation in fiction runs through character as often as through physics. The purest links are decision-shaped: an event provokes a choice, and the choice creates the next event. This is where cause and effect meets characterisation, because what a person does in response to pressure is who they are. A plot whose causes are all external, accidents, coincidences, weather, can still work, but a plot whose causes are choices accumulates moral weight with every link.
One honest exception: coincidence is admissible as a cause of trouble, never as a cause of rescue. Readers accept bad luck starting a problem; they revolt at good luck solving one.
Watching the chain in real stories
Guy de Maupassant's 'The Necklace' (1884) is a flawless causal chain: vanity causes the borrowing, the borrowing causes the loss, the loss causes the secret replacement, the replacement causes ten years of debt, and the debt causes the ruined face that triggers the final revelation. Remove any link and the story collapses, which is the sign of true plotting.
Thomas Hardy built entire novels on chains where small causes compound into fate; a letter slipped under a door and then under a carpet redirects lives. At the tight end, Jack London's 'To Build a Fire' (1908) chains one man's decisions to their physical consequences with the coldness of an experiment: each error causes the condition that makes the next error likelier. Note in all three how late effects are proportionate to early causes grown over time, not sudden impositions.
How to audit and strengthen your own chain
Take your draft and write one line per scene, then read the lines as a sequence, inserting 'therefore' or 'but' between them. Anywhere you can only honestly write 'and then', you have found a weak link: either forge a cause, or cut the scene and redistribute its content. This costs an hour and finds more structural problems than a month of general tinkering.
Strengthen links by converting external causes into decisions. Instead of the storm delaying the journey, let the character choose to drive into the storm because pride will not let them cancel. Plant causes early so effects can arrive late: the best final scenes are detonations of charges laid in the first act. Contest judges reading blind respond to exactly this, a 1,500-word entry whose ending is caused by its opening feels engineered rather than assembled, and it shows in the structure strand of a score.
Common mistakes
The most damaging is the rescue coincidence: the long-lost uncle, the sudden inheritance, the villain's convenient heart attack. Each one refunds every prior scene's tension, because the outcome is revealed as unearned. The mirror error is the unprovoked event, drama imported into the middle of a story with no root in what came before, which readers experience as the author's hand entering the frame.
Subtler mistakes include effects without costs, where consequences somehow never constrain later options, and chains that run through only one character while everyone else waits politely for their scene. Give secondary characters their own small causal chains and let them intersect the main one. Finally, beware of over-chaining: not every cup of tea needs a cause. Texture can simply exist; it is the load-bearing events that must be linked.
What poets can take from this
- Summarise each scene in a line and connect the lines with 'therefore' or 'but'; repair every 'and then'.
- Let decisions, not accidents, carry the main causal chain.
- Coincidence may cause trouble, never rescue.
- Plant early causes for late effects; endings should detonate, not arrive.
- Give minor characters small chains of their own that cross the protagonist's.
Try it yourself
Write a story of no more than 800 words in which a character misses a bus, and everything that follows, at least four further events, flows causally from that single miss. No new outside events allowed after the first paragraph.
Questions
What is the difference between story and plot?
In Forster's terms, story is events in time sequence, and plot is events linked by causality. 'The king died and then the queen died' is story; add 'of grief' and it becomes plot, because now one event explains the other.
Is coincidence ever acceptable in a plot?
Yes, at the start. An inciting coincidence, a wrong number, a chance meeting, is how many fine stories begin. The convention readers actually enforce is that coincidence may complicate a character's life but must never resolve it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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