Cause and Effect: How to Make Time Move on the Page
Why Your Sentences Don’t Work
A sentence can be flawless—clear, rhythmic, grammatically perfect—and still fail. The reason isn’t vocabulary or style. It’s time.
Readers don’t just read: they simulate. Every line of prose runs through their nervous system as if it’s happening to them. When the sequence of cause and effect breaks, the simulation fails. The reader isn’t experiencing the moment anymore, they’re decoding it. And if they have to decode it then they aren’t turning the page.
Most writers don’t even realize this is happening. Few fiction theorists have ever addressed it directly. Outside of Dwight V. Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer and Deborah Chester’s The Fantasy Fiction Formula, this topic barely exists in craft literature. Yet it’s one of the clearest marks of amateur writing, the invisible fracture that makes prose feel flat no matter how “well written” it seems. Professionals get the order right. Amateurs don’t even know there is an order.
The Rule of Experience
In film, cause and effect are visual. A man throws a punch, and the jaw snaps. You never wonder which came first. But in prose, the order lives entirely in syntax.
If a character curses before the tire blows, or decides before they feel, the brain hits static. The moment stops moving. The line might still make sense, but it no longer feels true.
That’s because human experience has a neurological order:
Something happens → the body reacts → the mind decides.
Break that sequence and you break the reader’s immersion.
The Chain in Motion
Here’s how it works in real time:
The gun cracked. Heat rose in her chest. She ducked and fired back.
Cause precedes effect. Sensation precedes action. The brain reads this as life-like, even if it’s fiction.
Reverse the order—
She ducked and fired. The gun cracked.
—and the tension dies. The reader has to reverse-engineer what just happened. They’re no longer inside the moment, they’re outside it.
Compression Without Confusion
Fast prose isn’t about cramming more beats together. It’s about maintaining clarity while speeding up motion. You can compress only after the causal chain is clear.
Bad: She cursed and yanked the wheel. The tire exploded.
Better: The tire exploded. She cursed and yanked the wheel.
The first forces the reader to solve what already happened. The second lets them feel it instantly.
Compression creates velocity but clarity creates tension. You can’t have one without the other.
Dialogue and Reaction
Dialogue follows the same rule. Speech is an action, but it still comes after emotion and reflex.
Bad: “Say that again.” The chair scraped. Heat climbed her neck.
Better: The chair scraped. Heat climbed her neck. “Say that again.”
When the dialogue comes first, the reader doesn’t feel what triggered it. The line becomes cerebral instead of embodied. Even conversation must obey time.
Why Order Is Everything
When the effect shows up before the cause, readers don’t stop out of confusion, they stop out of disbelief. The prose violates how consciousness actually moves.
Write the chain, compress it until it moves at the speed of thought, and bury it so the seams disappear, yet never break it, because once the order collapses, the reader’s sense of time collapses with it.
