AP® English Literature and Composition · Structure (STR) — Skill Category 3, Prose Fiction
3.A Plot as a Chain of Cause and Effect (STR-1.A)
Plot is a chain where each event causes the next, not just a sequence where one thing happens after another. The test is whether you can swap "and then" for "therefore" between events.
A list of events only becomes a plot when each one produces the next. "The king died and then the queen died" is a sequence. "The king died, therefore the queen died of grief" is a plot, because the second event happens for a reason supplied by the first. That one swap, and then to therefore, is the whole mechanism. It forces a writer to show why B happens, not just that B comes after A. Once every link in the chain does that work, the story has somewhere it must go, because each effect is also the cause of what comes next.
This is easy to confuse with order of telling, which is a separate thing entirely. A novel can open at a funeral, jump back years to a quarrel, return to the week of the death, and end with a letter written before the quarrel started. Nothing there changes the plot itself, which is still the straight causal chain running from the letter's promise to the death at the funeral. What changes is which links the writer shows you first. Plot is the chain of causes; order of telling is the choice of when to reveal each link.
Because the chain is causal, it is fragile. Pull one event out of the middle and everything downstream loses its reason for happening. An effect with no cause behind it stops looking like part of a plot and starts looking like coincidence, which is also why endings land or fall flat depending on whether the last event is still visibly paid for by the first.
Key terms
- Plot
- The chain of events in which each one causes the next, not just the order they are told in.
- Causal chain
- A sequence of events linked by therefore rather than and then, where each effect becomes the next cause.
- Order of telling
- The sequence in which a narrative actually presents events to the reader, which can differ from their causal order.
- Sequence
- Events arranged only by time, with no event shown to produce the next one.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does swapping and then for therefore turn a sequence of events into an actual plot?
- Common mistakeWhy isn't the plot of a story the same as the order the story chooses to tell you things in?
- Worked exampleShow me the cause and effect chain running from the witches' prophecy to Macbeth's death.
- Going furtherWhat happens to a plot when you pull one event out of the middle of the chain?
Check yourself
End of topic.