Logic

The word log­ic appears to be a Mid­dle Eng­lish word bor­rowed from the French lan­guage, but only intro­duced into the writ­ten Eng­lish lan­guage in 1362 by the Eng­lish writer William Lang­land.  It was he who wrote Piers Plow­man, a foun­da­tion­al Eng­lish poem from Chaucer’s time.

A func­tion­al def­i­n­i­tion of log­ic may be “rea­son­ing accord­ing to strict prin­ci­ples of validity.”

And while we may not think of the con­cept as hav­ing any­thing to do with fic­tion, it is not just a key aspect of nar­ra­tive, but par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant to readers.

Con­sid­er the last nov­el you read: did the sto­ry unfold in such a way that it was believable?

Did the events move from one to anoth­er in a fash­ion that you thought made sense?  Was it all credible?

I can recall the writer (and my old friend) the late Bob Cormi­er telling me that “we are allowed only one coin­ci­dence per plot.” On the oth­er hand, I take heart with the notion that “Coin­ci­dences are God’s lit­tle miracles.”

As I com­pose a new book — as I am now doing — I am con­stant­ly ask­ing myself what should (can) hap­pen next?  Do the events, actions, rev­e­la­tion, char­ac­ters, etc., flow log­i­cal­ly from what I have already writ­ten? In fact, it is not unusu­al for me to back­track in my revi­sions to intro­duce some­thing into the sto­ry at the begin­ning, so as to allow some­thing else to hap­pen (log­i­cal­ly) down the road, so to speak. The read­er (hope­ful­ly) does not notice.

[Thus, in a book I had recent­ly fin­ished — a tale in the wilder­ness — it occurred to me belat­ed­ly that I neglect­ed to sup­ply my char­ac­ters with water to drink. Back into the text I went and no longer found myself up a creek, so to speak.

Fine writ­ers cre­ate sto­ries with deep log­ic, bring­ing about rev­e­la­tions, and new kinds of truth.

On the oth­er hand, if there is no inher­ent log­ic in what hap­pens, the read­er may (and often does) feel cheated. 

It’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to see how this works in a mys­tery, or detec­tive fic­tion. Here, in a curi­ous way, the log­ic is delib­er­ate­ly hid­den, or made obscure, in the ser­vice of the puz­zle. But at the same time, when the log­ic of the deduc­tion is revealed, one wants the read­er to say “Of course!”

And there are nov­els (romance) which, as it were, require a hap­py end­ing, and even then, one wants to cre­ate (hope­ful­ly) log­ic to make it so.

Com­e­dy cre­ates its own log­i­cal prob­lem. Much depends on sur­prise, twists, the unex­pect­ed, but here again it needs to make sense—logic.

I’m not sug­gest­ing that writ­ers are philoso­phers, only that they should think philo­soph­i­cal­ly.  Because I do think good writ­ing cre­ates under­stand­ing (log­ic) out of the chaos of life.

QED.

(Latin abbre­vi­a­tion for quod erat demon­stran­dum: “Which was to be demon­strat­ed.” Q.E.D. may appear at the con­clu­sion of a text to sig­ni­fy that the author’s over­all argu­ment has just been proven.)