The ‘So…, But…’ Chain
A simple, incisive, scalable test of your story logic.
Causality and Meaning
Story logic is crucial to understanding character. Story logic is built on causality – the connection between cause and effect in your characters’ actions.
Causality isn’t only about plot. It’s how we derive meaning from action. It’s how we get to understand the characters.
Not through them telling us about themselves, but through observing what they do in response to what happens to them, and interpreting it through Theory of Mind.
For our understanding to be clear, the chain needs to be clear. And tight.
An excellent simple tool for checking this is ‘So…, But…’
This idea, in various iterations, is a foundation of drama. This is my version. You can also see it in Pixar’s therefore/but principle.
How does it work?
In drama, causality begins when a character acts on a need within a specific situation. Here’s a straightforward beat by beat example.
- Amy has only been working at a company for six months,
- But she thinks she deserves a raise.
- So she asks her immediate supervisor to endorse her request,
- But he turns her down,
- So she goes to the HR manager,
- and so on.
- A character puts a need into action in a situation,
- Meets an obstacle (the ‘But…’)
- Changes the action (the ‘So…’)
- Which meets a new obstacle (‘But…’)
- Triggers a new choice of action (‘So…’)
- And so on.
To make your story clear, you make sure that within each sequence you can identify the chains of causality: Amy wants a raise, so she…, but…, and so on.
Watch out for Then…
When you’re analysing your story using this tool, watch out for ‘Then…’. This tells you that you, not the characters, are driving your story.
‘Then…’ sequences signal that events are happening because the writer needs them to, not because the character’s choices created them.
I find ‘Meantime…’ and ‘Later on…’ workable – as long as you tie them back.
For ‘Meantime..’ which is about another parallel story thread, we need to see that it will become a ‘But…’. .
For ‘Later on…’ we need to see a ‘So…’ coming down the pike.
The Big Picture
Even better, this tool is scalable. You can apply it to a moment, a beat, a scene, a sequence, an act, a story arc, or the whole film.
It will help you find story weaknesses at any point and at any size.
The Bonus
Not only does this tool help you identify weak spots in your storytelling, it can also help you avoid a common writer’s trap: over-simplifying the conflict so it provides dramatic energy but reveals nothing about character.
Feeling like your story struggles to have both story impetus and character development? Try this.
In every situation, the need has two faces: what the character wants to get; and what they want to avoid.
The intersection of these two faces gives the resulting action precision. It’s sharpens the character’s choice, because they must navigate two conflicting pressures, not just one.
Just as actors tend to overlook the choices the character didn’t make in favour of the choices they did make, writers tend to focus on only one of the character’s objectives: either what they are pursuing, or what they are avoiding, when true precision needs both.
What’s more, what they want, and what they want to avoid, have to be quite different things. The character is not just trying to maximise their chance of success and minimise their chance of failure. That’s just saying the same thing in two different ways.
They’re trying to succeed at one thing while actively avoiding something else quite different. In other circumstances those two needs would be quite disconnected. It’s only these specific circumstances that tie them together.
Say my need is to get the money for my rent by the end of the day. Without constraints, there are many ways I could achieve that. I could emotionally blackmail my mother. I could put pressure on a friend. I could mug someone.
Without constraints – the things I’m trying to avoid – my possible choices are too broad.
But, if I don’t want to get arrested, and I don’t want to give my mother more ammunition to call me a hopeless loser, and I want to keep the respect of my friend, my choices narrow sharply.
It’s the obstacles – internal and external – that turn my choice of action from a sledgehammer to a scalpel.
And here’s the bonus. When I apply this process to a character, those conflicting needs (to gain something while avoiding something else) help me break down the character’s pursuit of their need into a series of individual events that escalate internal pressure and reveal character. All without unnecessary exposition.
You do this by ranking the obstacles, and creating a separate event around each.
Ranking the obstacles
With my writer’s hat on, I ask myself, “Which choice of action offers the best chance of success and the least risk of triggering what the character fears? And can the order I show them say something meaningful about who they are?”
Most audiences would assume the natural escalating order for a character seeking the rent would be:
- Go to a friend. Fail.
- Go to their mother. Fail again.
- Mug someone.
But, what if your character’s order is:
- Go to a friend. Fail.
- Attempt to mug someone. Fail.
- Go to their mother.
That order immediately tells the audience how charged the mother relationship must be: especially if we’ve already seen how difficult they find step 2, mug someone.
If mugging someone is excruciating for them, but still easier than going to their mother, how loaded is that relationship?
Which then means that you don’t need to write a ‘big’ scene with the mother, full of overt conflict. You can write a scene that is perfectly civil and loving on the surface, with all the conflict in the subtext, because the audience knows that, if this is your character’s last choice, then there must be a lot going on under the surface.
Each step still follows the So…, But… logic — a choice, an obstacle, and a revised choice — but the order of those steps is doing even more subtle story work.
This is how So…, But… transforms choice into character, and character into story. It’s sharper, cleaner, and far more revealing than exposition — because it lets the audience read the story beneath the story.
