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Fiction as a String or Web of If-Then Statements

In addition to laboratory experiments on ideas, works of fiction can also be thought of as elaborate if-then statements, comparable to those in much clearer-defined fields such as mathematics and logic.

For fiction, the elements of stories about which readers should “suspend their disbelief” are the if side of the statement, and the implicit agreement is that the story will produce from those ifs a number of thens that are both logical and surprising.

Of course one of the goals of fiction is to make the story flow so naturally that readers do not even perceive they are making assumptions (accepting givens) on their way to the conclusion. For this reason it can be difficult to pick apart the bits that must be accepted from the bits we should analyze and examine. A relatively simple way of telling them apart is that when ifs are done wrong, readers think “What the heck?”  (your main character is a boxing neurosurgeon?), but when thens are done wrong, readers thinks “It wouldn’t happen like that!” (a character you set up as a typical office worker fights off six trained assassins in scene three).

Ifs and Thens in Catcher in the Rye

Some of the explicit and implicit ifs in Catcher in the Rye are:

• situational characteristics: the death of Holden’s brother Allie
• character characteristics: the personalities of major characters such as Holden’s former girlfriend and his favorite professor
• aspects of the writing itself: implicit bias we assume there will be towards Holden’s point of view, because Holden is “speaking.”

This story is a classic because Salinger does an excellent job of developing believable effects from those givens in a dynamic way. For example, Holden loves his sister, we have to take this if as a given, which justifies why he would risk being caught by his parents to sneak back and visit her toward the middle of the novel. But it would also make sense from both his and her character that he would let her know his plans to go to California (if: he loves her; then: he won’t go far away without telling her), that she would want to go with him (if: she loves him and he is going away, then: she will want to go with him), and that he would refuse her (if: he loves her and she tries to give up her life for vagrant travels with him, then: he will refuse to let her), with each then being part of the if in the next scene.

Speculative Fiction – Big Ifs

The same is true of speculative writing, it simply presents more extreme ifs and thens. Science fiction presents us with worlds, parts of which are meant to be accepted as-is, and parts accepted as realistic extrapolations. Fantasy includes even less reference to our current world, but almost all such stories include humans or human-like characters, whose basic psychological characteristics we are expected to judge based on our own. Moreover, because of the size of the ifs, the thens must follow even more strictly than with mainstream fiction.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, we are made painfully aware that the main ring gives the wearer a connection to a being of pure and overpowering evil. Not one of the characters could wear the ring for long without being overcome by the evil, and heroes prove their goodness not by overcoming the power of the ring, but by avoiding testing themselves. If one character were immune, we would feel cheated or disappointed.

The Part We Care Most About is the Thens

Thinking of writing in this way is useful for me because it reminds me that the important, and enjoyable, part of writing is in seeing how the story develops (the thens), not the scene or situation (the ifs). I love worldbuilding, and spend inordinate amounts of time on it, but the proof of anything I write will still be in the way all the ifs crash and jangle against each other to produce a dynamic stream of thens.

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