The motivation-reaction unit (MRU) helps writer’s structure sentences and scenes alike. It is a way of thinking about the cause and effect relationship of incidents within your story. Many writers place the effect before the cause, which makes readers slow down and think about what happened. Even a seconds slowing can distract and/or confuse a reader, so it’s best to keep things in the right order.
Here are a few examples:
Effect then cause:
The cat scratched Simon’s face because Simon pulled it’s tail.
Cause then effect:
Simon pulled the cat’s tail, and it scratched his face.
Effect then cause:
Gertrude slammed the front door, after seeing a man with a shotgun running across the lawn.
Cause then effect:
A man with a shotgun was running across the law. Gertrude slammed the front door.
Each of these examples is more powerful when the cause comes before the effect. The reader has to think less about what just happened when the motivation (cause) come before the reaction (effect).
Sequencing your reaction in the right order is also important. A person reacts to a stimulus in a very specific way. When you get things out of order, it slows the reader down. Reactions occur in the following order:
- Emotional and thoughts
- Action including involuntary actions
- Speech
If you stop to analyze how you reaction to various things in your environment, you will see that you have an emotional response or thought first, followed by an action, and finally speech. Keeping things in the right order helps readers suspend their disbelief and reduces the acrobatics their brains have to engage in to understand what is happening with your amazing characters.
If you want to learn more about structuring your novel, I highly recommend K.M. Weiland’s book Structuring Your Novel (picture above).
Part one of this series can be found here.
Part two of this series can be found here.
Happy Writing!
Fighting For A Chance To Dream 