hi i'm cam weiland stories are about stuff that happens but even more importantly they're about stuff that happens because other stuff happened in short they are about repercussions everything that happens in your story needs to inspire character reactions that are so radical and progressive that the story couldn't be the same without them this harks back to the standard advice that if you can pull any scene from your story without changing the overall plot then that scene probably isn't important enough to the plot to stay in the book what this all comes down to is this
everything that happens in your story needs to result in repercussions the bigger your character's action the bigger the repercussion otherwise no matter how big and impressive and generally awesome your latest scene it has no impact on the plot and if it has no impact on the plot if everyone just goes on their merry way as if nothing really happened then you've essentially told readers that this big awesome event really wasn't that big or awesome this goes beyond just character reactions which i've talked about before this is about making sure that your characters never get off
easy for example a fantasy i read recently featured a shocking scene in which the protagonist kills someone by tossing her over his balcony it's a scene that completely shifts the paradigm of the story in ways that had the potential to be extremely interesting as it turned out however this scene ended up being completely inconsequential to the story because the character experienced zero repercussions his bodyguards cover up the murder his family forgives him there's not even much soul searching going on so not only did the authors zap the potency right out of this powerful scene he
also weakened the causality of his entire story by indicating that his character will never be held accountable for any of his decisions or actions
