Everyone remembers those decisions, those actions (or inactions) that, well, could have changed your world -always in our belief, for the better. Of course, many of the other decisions, the other actions (or inactions) that DID change your world… most of those are forgotten. Not all, naturally – we remember wedding anniversaries (or we can find ourselves very much the worse off). But ‘if only’ very seldom stops at the specific thing that we could or should or wished we had done. We assume that our history would have changed by that butterfly-flap, and that life would have been very different thereafter.
It’s the foundation of a whole genre of alternate history novels in the direct sense. We take ‘what if’ and try and extrapolate that, hopefully in a logical sense. It’s sort of fun, if the author and the reader are logical people. Logic and ‘decision trees’ certainly underpins my writing. Hell, it underpins my life. I spend a lot of time thinking ‘if I take this step, what are the possible outcomes? And what are the outcomes of those outcomes’, and so on. The further out you get from it all, the more other factors you hadn’t known about yet are likely to make those predictions a bit iffy, but most of us can work two or three steps ahead, and how probable they are. When you’re operating purely on ‘it seems like a good idea at the time’ with no thought of where that will take you, well… you’re either very well insulated, or were trying for a Darwin award. We’ve made these harder to win, but an amazing number of people still try.
But for me – and yes this is the rock-climber, and the guy who dives into underwater cracks and caves 30 feet down, to catch spiny lobsters – it’s always a calculated risk, thinking a number of logical steps ahead – and the probable directions things can take. It has gone spectacularly wrong a few times, but so far, the decision tree included those possibilities, and that helped me deal with the results.
Which is kind of how I write my books, and why they get faster to write towards the end. At first there are multiple decisions in every scene – sometimes ones that would the story very rapidly – either by reaching the goal the short way, or killing the character, and these must follow a logical path. I spend time working out just what the end result of each would likely be. Then I put in place obstacles or motivations – good logical reasons why the character follows that path. And then when they get to the next step, they follow the same decision tree branching again – I must look where all the options go, and then make the character’s nature or circumstance follow the path I want. By the end of the book – the decisions are thinned down to the end being logical and likely. (Possibly still unexpected, but plausibly likely).
For me that is satisfying. But I am not sure how important logic is to readers. I may be expecting people to be as analytical and probability centered as I am. And too many people seem not to think much ahead.
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Decision Trees”
Any given reader may not understand it, but if it is wrong they will still feel like something is subtly off, even if they can’t tell what.
Giving my characters foresight causes them to “Nope” themselves right out of the story.
Reminding them that they’re operating on only partial information, and reassuring them that it’ll all work out in the end doesn’t work any better than yelling “Wait! Come back!”
All my characters think they know what will happen when they make their decisions, and even think they know how other characters will react, but they’re no more savvy about that than any of the rest of us (including, sometimes, the author).
Now, there do have to be reasons why reactions are what they are, but if real people can’t predict reactions all that accurately, why should my characters have that superpower themselves?
I love the “what if” in stories. When I’m done reading at the end of the night I typically think through what the next steps of the character would be, or what I would have done differently in that situation. The author and I rarely agree.
Of course, the classic “what if” stories were the Choose Your Own Adventure books. My friends and I read dozens of those as kids, trading back and forth for the ones we hadn’t already read. They’re also one of the few uses of second person story telling that I’ve come across.
There have been quite a few movies that have done the “what if” routine as well. It’s A Wonderful Life might be the most famous.
And “The Butterfly Effect” might be one of the worst (in my opinion), even though it does look at all the different options and effects of trying to improve the future by changing the past.
And Characters can have “what if” or “if only” moments. Character building, even when otherwise unimportant to the story.