Story structure, cause & effect, and narrative order tips from award-winning author David Levine
Learning how to write complicated plots is one of the hardest challenges any author faces. Where do you even begin? Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author David D. Levine has a framework for untangling even the messiest story ideas. His approach is practical, visual, and surprisingly freeing. Here are his key tips, broken down for writers at every experience level.
Story vs. plot vs. narrative
David starts by clarifying three terms writers often use interchangeably. He defines the story as a loose cloud of all related incidents, characters, and settings. Think of it as everything that exists in your fictional universe. The plot is the cause-and-effect chain connecting those incidents. The narrative is the specific order you put those incidents on the page.
These three things are not the same. Confusing them makes complicated plots feel impossible. Keeping them separate gives you control. David quotes E.M. Forster: “The king died, then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, then the queen died of grief” is a plot. That one word — grief — creates the causal link that makes plot meaningful.
Think of incidents as beads in space-time
David introduces a memorable mental model. Picture every scene or incident in your story as a small colorful bead. Each bead exists at a fixed point in space and time — a specific place, a specific moment. Two characters arguing in a dining room on Tuesday night? That’s one bead. A sword fight happening across town at the same moment? That’s a different bead, same time, different location.
This model helps writers see their story as a collection of fixed, concrete events. Nothing is fuzzy. Nothing is floating. Every incident has coordinates. Once you visualize your story this way, moving pieces around becomes much less overwhelming.
Cause and effect is the foundation of plot
The beads don’t just sit in space. Some of them connect to each other through cause and effect. David calls these connections the true foundation of plot. One incident creates the conditions that make another incident possible, or inevitable.
In Hamlet, the king’s murder is the inciting incident. Because of it, Hamlet vows revenge. Because of it, the uncle becomes king and marries Hamlet’s mother. Two effects from one cause. Those effects then become causes for further events. The result is a branching, interconnected tree. Understanding how to write complicated plots means understanding this tree, not just the sequence of events, but why each one happens.
The narrative is your string
Once you understand your beads and their cause-and-effect relationships, your job is to thread them into a line. That line is your narrative. David uses the image of a string running through the holes in the beads. The string imposes order. It creates the reading experience.
Here’s the key insight: the narrative order doesn’t have to match the chronological order of events. You choose where to start, when to reveal information, and which incidents to dramatize fully versus merely mention. That creative power is entirely yours. Learning how to write complicated plots is largely about learning to use that power wisely.
Choose which incidents to show vs. tell
Not every bead belongs on the string. Some incidents you dramatize fully — you put the reader in the scene. Others you only mention or allude to. In Hamlet, Ophelia’s death is never shown directly. A character rushes in and announces it. Shakespeare chose to tell, not show. That was a deliberate decision.
“Show, don’t tell” is common writing advice. David pushes back gently. If you showed everything in a World War II novel, it would be five years long. Selective telling is essential. Your job is deciding which incidents earn full scenes and which ones serve the story better as references or backstory.
Use Post-it notes or Scrivener to rearrange scenes
So how do you actually manage all these incidents on paper? David recommends a simple, tactile exercise. Write each incident on a Post-it note. Spread them out. Move them around. Ask: what if the reader doesn’t learn this until much later? What if this revelation comes as a surprise? Sometimes moving a single bead transforms the entire emotional experience of the story.
David recommends Scrivener for complicated plots. Scrivener treats each scene as a moveable card. You can color-code by POV character, reorder freely, and see the whole structure at a glance. For complicated plots, it’s far more manageable than scrolling through one long Word document.
Plotters and pantsers face the same work
David acknowledges the plotter vs. pantser divide, but he makes an important point. Both approaches require the same fundamental work. Plotters sort their incidents before drafting. Pantsers write the messy draft first and sort it out afterward. Either way, you eventually need to understand the cause-and-effect structure of your story.
As a pantser, you might finish a full draft and then realize a scene from chapter two would land harder as a flashback in chapter fourteen. That’s not failure; that’s revision doing its job. Learning how to write complicated plots doesn’t require outlining in advance. It does require being willing to excavate and reorder after the fact.
Trust your subconscious
David writes all his stories from beginning to end without skipping around. He often reaches the climax only to discover the pivotal detail was something he planted in an early chapter — something he threw in purely because it felt interesting at the time. That’s not psychic ability. His subconscious was quietly solving the story the entire time he was writing it.
This is an encouraging idea for writers who feel lost in a complicated plot. Your brain is working even when you aren’t. Write forward. Trust that the connections will emerge. The bead you place on page ten may be exactly what the story needs on page three hundred.
Managing multiple POV characters
Complicated plots often involve multiple point-of-view characters, each following their own storyline. David suggests thinking of these as separate plot threads; each one is a string of beads belonging to a particular character. The threads may run parallel for stretches, then intersect around shared incidents that affect both storylines, and ultimately converge at the end.
David describes one unpublished novel where one POV spanned January to December while a second POV ran from November to December. The two timelines drew closer and closer until they merged near the climax. Told chronologically, that would have kept one character offstage for eleven months. The structural choice, alternating between past and present, was what the story demanded.
Handling simultaneous events
When two things happen at the same time in different places, you can’t show both at once. David points to Shakespeare’s battle scenes as a model. Plays like the history plays cut between different parts of a battlefield with stage directions like “elsewhere in the battle.” The technique works just as well in prose.
You have two main options. Show one complete scene, then rewind and show the parallel scene in full. Or cut back and forth between them in short snippets. The second approach creates more tension. Leave a scene at a cliffhanger moment, jump to the parallel action, and the reader’s urgency doubles. David also notes you can use a scene switch to smuggle in important information — readers distracted by one storyline often absorb a planted clue in the other without realizing its significance until later.
Put it all together
Learning how to write complicated plots comes down to a few core practices David champions. Know the difference between story, plot, and narrative. Understand the cause-and-effect tree connecting your incidents. Thread those incidents into a narrative order that creates the emotional effect you want. Use tools like Post-it notes or Scrivener to make the structure visible and moveable. Trust that both drafting and revision will reveal connections you couldn’t plan for.
Complicated plots are not impossible. They’re just large. Break them into beads. Find the string. Thread them with intention — and your readers won’t be able to put the book down.
Editor’s note: This blog post was developed from a First Draft Friday conversation with Alessandra Torre and David D. Levine.
Watch the interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9GqxK0-nHo
About David D. Levine
David D. Levine is a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction author with over 60 published short stories and four novels to his name. His debut novel, Arabella of Mars, is a beloved Regency steampunk space opera. David is also an active writing instructor, teaching craft workshops online and at major conventions. Learn more at DavidDLevine.com.
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