Logic Shifts

Contrary to what I said yesterday, logic does not always stay. Logic shifts. A logical mind is always logical, but a situation may have more than one logical conclusion.

Consider this scene: The protagonist (let's call her Sarah) bound to a chair, with an antagonist (let's call him Pete) pointing a gun to her head.

The first logical conclusion is that Sarah would covertly free her hands, then kick Pete between the legs and escape. Another logical conclusion would have Sarah seduce Pete, who frees her, allowing her to knock him out and escape.

Both of these are very common and on any given day, with the given scene, I might come up with either answer as a gut reaction. In this case, it doesn't make a huge difference because Pete is incapacitated and Sarah escapes. But there comes a problem with the logical progression (going from A to B to C ). Each time the logic changes, the natural logic that takes me to the next step shifts.

For example, suppose my original idea was for Sarah to kick Pete in the balls and runs away. She has to escape from where she is being held, where other people will be trying to stop her, forcing her to keep it covert. However, if my logic shifts and Sarah seduces Pete, she might take him hostage instead of incapacitating him. Now she can escape from where she was being held, but she couldn't do it in hiding. Instead, she will have to threaten all the guards and possibly use Pete as a human shield.

Sometimes these logic shifts are not what characters do but when they do them. Timing can be critical in stories. Romeo and Juliet is all about timing. The difference between life and death was how quickly the messenger reached his destination.

If you want to avoid these shifts, you need to write down more than a simple sentence. You need to create a logic lattice. Write down every significant point. Everything you write down becomes a point of structure, preventing your logic from shifting too far between these points.

If I made a logic lattice for my above example, it would read something like: Sarah is tied to a chair, seduces Pete, knocks him out. She ties Pete up so he can't call for help and she escapes through the duct work.

It's a lot more in depth than "Sarah is tied to a chair", but it also prevents the story from deviating too far from where I intend it to go.

A logic lattice may be a loose collection of points. I may be working on a story where, five months after the opening scene, I want to make sure that the protagonist gets in a car crash where the passenger side of the car is crumpled because he turned too quickly and slipped on glare ice. It seems an odd point to make. Without context, there is no reason to know why it matters, but that's not what a lattice is for; it's simply a useful reminder. If I spend most of my time working on the beginning of my story, it will be all too easy to forget that scene. But if I keep that one note there, I will make sure that I don't lose it and that my story will go exactly where I want it to.