Edith Finch and Causality

A storytelling lesson from the critically acclaimed video game

One of the enjoyable things about the interactive story What Remains of Edith Finch is examining all of the tragic deaths of most of the game's characters and seeing how they all interconnect. Some in the game blame a family curse, but most of the deaths can be attributed to reckless, irresponsible, shortsighted, and otherwise questionable decisions made by the victims and the people close to them. Among the valuable life lessons you can learn from this game:
1. Never leave your baby in a bathtub unattended.
2. There are better places to build a swing than at the edge of a cliff.
3. When relocating to a new neighborhood, you do not have to take your entire old house with you.
4. Be aware of your surroundings. Especially when standing on train tracks.
5. Using the front door is a safer way to leave than taking a sledgehammer to the wall.
6. You really shouldn't leave your children home alone when there are gangs of killers roaming the streets in your neighborhood.
7. When hunting deer, make sure the deer is actually dead before trying to take pictures with it.
8. When your loved ones are disconnected from reality and fantasizing about suicide, you might want to keep them away from sharp objects.
9. Flying a kite in a storm is not a good idea.
10. There is a reason why med labels say do not take with alcohol.
11. Do not send your child to bed hungry and lock them in their room. No, seriously, someone should call CPS on you if you're doing that.

Most of these bad decisions stem from the family members not properly coping with loss. In some of these instances, the bad decisions were drastic lifestyle changes that years later would culminate in the circumstances leading up to someone's death.

In a previous article, I spoke of how you as a writer can prioritize making choices and making the consequences of those choices matter (read it here). But Edith Finch also illustrates how a bigger tapestry of sequences and progression that involves more than just the decisions made by the principal characters can affect a narrative. In Finch, almost every "accidental" death has a logical progression of events and circumstances that work in concert to create that situation. Calvin dies from being hit by a tent pole from Sam's unsecured tent for an outdoor wedding, which was picked up by the string from Calvin's kite combined with the strong winds of the storm he flew his kite in. Calvin was hit because he was too stubborn and defiant to take shelter with his family when the storm worsened, and neither Sam nor the others at the ceremony tried hard enough to get Calvin to safety. The whole incident was set up when Sam decided to have an outdoor wedding (which necessitated the tent) to a woman he never introduced to his children and Calvin, still reeling from losing his younger brother to a drowning accident and his mother to divorce, reacted negatively to that...and his father made no effort to smooth things over with him. All of these factors combined to seal Calvin's fate, and if any one of these factors happens differently, the scenario might have had a different progression and possibly a different outcome.
The reader of your story should be able to connect dots and see how a particular moment in the story was orchestrated by different elements. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Details matter
When crafting the important moments in your story, take a hard look at everything that factors into making the moment happen. Look at the characters involved and the decisions they made to get to that moment. Look at the setting and environment it happens in, and how that particular setting came to be the place the moment happeed in as opposed to somewhere else. Examine the props and items used in that moment and ask yourself how those items came to be such a vital part of the moment and why. Now, armed with that information, use it to set up your moment. With all of the details being highlighted in some way, it adds to the realism and believability of the scene, and be the reader can better visualize what is happening and why.

The importance of sequencing
The Final Destination movies are reknown for staging elaborate sequences of events that lead to the deaths of their characters. Each death is foreshadowed heavily, and you can visibly see the progression of the scenario leading up to the character's death. A near death from a van crash has the driver unable to lean back because a sharp beam protrudes from her backseat, but a careless EMT uses the jaws of life on the van, triggering the airbag which knocks her head right onto the beam, killing her instantly...and making her drop the lit cigarette she was smoking onto a trail of gas left behind by the van when it was out of control. the trail of gas lights up, igniting something that launches a barbed wire fence right into the path of another gentleman that has no time to get out of the way. Think of each moment leading up to your key moment as a domino in an elaborate setup, and just like with falling dominoes, each small moment directly causes the next small moment, which causes the next, until the moments build on each other and get bigger until your big moment becomes the only logical outcome. This happens a lot in rom-coms and stories where some sort of betrayal happens. In these types of stories there are secrets being harbored, and throughout the story, these secrets fester as people work to keep them from coming out, or exposure is teased but doesn't happen, and this builds until the payoff moment when the secrets actually do come out, and that reveal pivots the entire story.

Setting up the unexpected.
You can also have moments in your story where something entirely unexpected happens with no buildup, progression or hint. Moments like these are great for shock value, shifting focus or changing the trajectory of a story. It may seem like this flies in the face of everything I just wrote, but it actually doesn't. Having the unexpected happen can be a great catalyst because now the characters and environment have to react and deal with the fallout of that random moment. And this event becomes the first domino to fall of an entirely new setup. Also, while this moment may come as an unexpected shock to your characters and maybe even your readers, it does not have to be a shock to you. You can still plant subtle hints that something unexpected is about to happen that your readers could (and should) miss their first time reading your story, but will be evident on subsequent readthroughs.

Conclusion
Think of setting up your scenes like a classic Rube-Goldberg machine. In a machine like that, each random piece has a purpose and function that might not make much sense on its own, but it combined and works with the other parts to create a seamless sequence of happenings that all build up toward the machine's intended goal. This is exactly how your characters, environments, details and prior events work together to build up to your big moment. Keep this in mind when you write your scenes, and your stories will be more engaging for it.

If you find this article useful, subscribe! I post these every week, along with monthly author interviews and subscriber-exclusive content.