Change, cause & effect

Why does anything happen in life?

• How do you become stronger or weaker?
• Happier or sadder?
• More kind or more cruel?

We make sense of ourselves and the world around us by figuring out cause and effect relationships:

• I stayed up too late, so this morning I'm tired.
• They made me put my phone away, so now I'm fidgety and restless.
• My uncle is a builder, so I'm going to ask him for a job in construction.

Some of these cause and effect relationships are real, some are figments of our imagination, and most of them are completely unknown to us.

Even so, cause and effect is how we make sense of the world.

It's also how we make sense of stories: in stories, we expect events to connect in some meaningful way. 

But surprisingly for something that we understand so intuitively in life, cause and effect can be hard to establish in narrative.

In this lesson, we'll look at:

• How connecting words help us establish cause and effect in narrative.
• How we can infer cause and effect without connecting words.
• How cause and effect leads to changes in character and circumstance.

It's a pretty deep topic, so if you're ready let's get prepped.