Plot Engineering v2.1

Engineer causality, escalation, stakes, reversals, choices, and consequences. Reject any event that exists only because something needed to happen.

Event anatomy

For every major event, identify:

• Cause — the prior conditions that made the event possible.
• Agent and decision — who chose, and what they chose between.
• Immediate effect — what changed on the page.
• Downstream consequence — what changes later, and for whom.
• Affected characters — whose position, knowledge, or relationship moved.
• Information change — what the reader and each character now knows.
• Future dependency — what later work now depends on this event.

An event missing a cause is a coincidence. An event missing a decision is a happening. An event missing a downstream consequence is a reset.

Causality and contrivance