Turn a list of events into a story that people finish

A story is a causal chain. Each beat exists because of the one before it: either it follows from it (therefore) or it's blocked by something (but). When two beats are joined by "and then", the second one doesn't need the first one, and the reader feels it as boredom even if they can't say why.

This is the cheapest kind of meaning for a reader to decode. Cause and effect between people and things is what we understand before we understand words, so a chain of "therefore"s and "but"s carries a reader through material they'd never read as a list.

The test

Write the beats as single lines, one event each. Read the joint between each pair aloud with the three words:

• therefore: this beat happened because of the last one. It's a consequence, a decision, a move.
• but: this beat pushes against the last one. It's a failure, a surprise, a cost, someone saying no.
• and then: neither. This beat is just next in time.

Every "and then" joint is a place to work. Repair it one of three ways:

1. Find the real cause. Usually there is one and the draft hid it. "We added a diary, and then a hand-off" becomes "We added a diary, but the next session didn't read a whole diary to find where it was, therefore a hand-off: one page, rewritten every time."
2. Cut the beat. If nothing caused it and nothing depends on it, the story doesn't need it. Keep it for the notes.
3. Move it. A beat can be orphaned because it's in the wrong place. Put it where its cause is.

A chain that's all "therefore" is a plan going well: a reader trusts it and doesn't care. A "but" is where the stakes are. Aim for a rhythm where "but"s keep arriving, and land the biggest one just before the end.

Building a chain from raw material

The source is a diary, a transcript, a commit log, an interview, a pile of notes. It's the pile, and it's in time order, which is "and then" order.

1. Name the want. One line: who wanted what, in their words if a transcript has them. Every later beat is measured against it. Without a want there's nothing for a "but" to push against.
2. Pull the events from the pile, one line each, still in time order.
3. Mark every joint therefore / but / and then.
4. Repair the "and then"s as above. When the pile doesn't say why something happened, the real cause is a fact you don't have: write [why?] and ask the person who was there. Inventing a cause is inventing a fact.
5. Find the turn: the last big "but", and the "therefore" it forces. That's usually what the piece is really about, and often the title.
6. Then write, beat by beat. Each beat can be one sentence or a short scene. The joints mostly stay unwritten: the reader should feel "but" without the text saying "but" at every seam.

The chain is done when every joint reads as "therefore" or "but", every beat points back at the want, and the turn is in the last third.

Scale

The rule holds at every size: between sections of a post, between paragraphs, between sentences in a tight passage. Check the large joints first. A post whose sections join by "and then" can't be saved by good sentences.

In a devlog

A devlog's natural chain: I wanted X, therefore I built Y, but Y broke in this way, therefore I learned Z and built W, but… The failures are the "but"s, which makes them the most valuable beats in the post, not embarrassments to tidy away. Keep dead ends in the order they happened, joined by what they caused.

Example

And-then version:

I bought tomato seedlings. Then I put them on the balcony. Then I built a windbreak. Then I moved them to the kitchen window. Then I got tomatoes.

But/therefore version:

I wanted tomatoes from my own balcony, therefore six seedlings went out in May. But the wind up there snapped two stems in a week, therefore I built a windbreak out of an old pallet. But the windbreak shaded them all afternoon, and they stopped flowering, therefore they came inside to the kitchen window. In August I got eleven tomatoes, all from the plant I'd nearly thrown out.

The second version holds the same facts. The joints are what make it a story.