What is the role of logic in fiction?
Ah yes, the ol' "science of evaluating arguments and reasoning" will hook those readers every time...
This came from a curiously ambiguous question on Quora, which made a great title for this post. It might not be the role you think it is, and the answer depends on why you’re asking the question.
Stick with me here…
Whether it was first said by Lord Byron, or Mark Twain, or another wise writer, it’s an incontrovertible fact: “Truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” Ron Tobias put it more bluntly: “In life, we expect things to happen out of the blue. In fiction, we won’t tolerate it.”1
There is a certain “logic” to fiction. But logic itself, as a scholarly discipline, doesn’t play any necessary role in either the act and process of writing or in the literature of fiction.
What sort of logic?
For example, when someone asks a casually ambiguous question about “logic,” I wonder whether they are talking about deductive or inductive logic, or classical logic, or perhaps something fancier like predicate logic. These can be useful tools for crafting clever plots or plot devices, spicing up dialogue between philosopher or scientist characters, or giving a “logician” character more depth. But they aren’t what authors and editors mean when we talk about “story logic.”
If you are a particularly deliberative person, you may find a role for academic logic in your creative process, but not if you think of Spock as obviously alien, or Sherlock Holmes as a boringly deductive savant.
“Story logic” isn’t academic logic. A better word for it might be “plausibility.” A story doesn’t need to be “logical” but it does need to make sense.
“Truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
Ron Tobias describes this inherent “sense-making” that sets a story apart from just a series of things that happened:
Everything in your [fiction] writing has a reason, a cause that leads to an effect, which in turn becomes the next cause. If you accept the premise that good writing is cause and effect, we progress to the next stage, that good writing appears to be casual but in truth is causal… by making the causal world appear casual, the reader accepts the convention that fiction is very much like life. Only the writer knows it just ain’t so.2
Do you have a favorite quote explaining why a story must “make sense” or “possess its own internal logic”? Share it here!
I would be happy to cite you as my source for it if I use it in a presentation or article, so include whatever URL you’d like me to include.
“Story logic” is also used to describe story structure. Kurt Vonnegut talked about this in terms of the “shape” of the story,3 while Larry Brooks (et alia)4 uses the more common terms “arc” or “structure,” often summarized in “beat sheets.”5
In flash fiction this can be as short as a joke’s two-part structure: the setup, then the punchline, which is an unexpected twist away from what the listener expected but in a way that still logically relates to the setup. If the listener understands the twist, if it makes sense in some way, then it’s recognizable as a joke, maybe even a good joke. If the unexpected twist makes no sense, then not only is it a bad joke, it doesn’t even sound like a joke. It’s just a weird thing to say that isn’t funny.
This is story logic at its most basic.
A joke that doesn’t make some kind of sense, in some frame of reference, isn’t just a bad joke. It isn’t a joke at all. It’s just a series of words.
In the same way, a story that doesn’t follow “story logic” at all isn’t just a bad story. It isn’t a story at all, it’s just a pointless series of events, what Tobias might call a “tale”.
It can be hard to nail down in precise academic terms, but because our brains are hard-wired to detect patterns, movement, causality, and story, we know it when we see it— and we know when the story logic isn’t working.
So the two most common ways we talk about story logic are:
the macro sense, the gestalt structure of the entire story (regardless of its length), and
the micro sense, its moment-by-moment “plausibility” or “credibility.”
You need both.
A story may be perfectly structured but have inconsistencies in its storyworld, forced character development, and dialogue or action that strains credulity to the breaking point. Its macro story logic can be impeccable, but its scene-and-detail implausibilities can derail it.
Or a story may be perfectly plausible at every small detail but end up disastrously unsatisfying if it has an unsatisfying plot (or no discernable plot at all). It was just “realistic stuff that happened for no reason.” Its micro-level story logic can be on-point, but bad story structure can make it feel like a waste of a reader’s time in the end.
And a story may have perfect structure, set in a vivid, internally-consistent storyworld full of fascinating characters, thrilling action, and scintillating dialogue, with a satisfying ending— and at first reading be entirely unpredictable, confusing, full of surprises, right up to the never-saw-it-coming twist ending. As long as it feels plausible (for that storyworld) moment by moment, and it all makes some kind of sense in the end, the story logic is sound.
There are tons of other ways you might apply logic to your fiction, from your creative process, research, market analysis and book-planning strategy, all the way to weaving an intricately complex plot for a mystery story, to organize your web of clues and misdirection. So “the role of logic in fiction” really depends on what you mean by “logic,” whether you’re focusing on the process of writing, the story itself, or marketing the finished product.
Just, please, make sure it is internally consistent and delivers what it promises.
Tell your story well, and publish wisely!
Ronald Tobias, 20 Master Plots and How to Build Them. Writers Digest Books (1993), a Random Penguin imprint (penguinrandomhouse.com). See p.34
Tobias, p.31, 33
https://storyempire.com/2021/03/03/basic-plots-vonneguts-from-bad-to-worse/
https://storyfix.com/ + https://www.jamesscottbell.com/styled-8/ + https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/secrets-story-structure-complete-series/
https://jamigold.com/2013/09/are-beat-sheets-intimidating-cut-through-the-clutter/