Forward and Backward Chaining
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
I've been reading Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction by Keith Oatley, which is a bit dense but absolutely relevant to my interests and to the topic of this newsletter. Oatley talks about fiction as a kind of dream, a kind of play, a way that we explore ideas by seeing how they might play out, maybe in a world that closely resembles this one or maybe in a world conspicuously different from ours, one that highlights the idea in question by abstracting it into fantastical forms. (Some scientific research into fiction is very anti-genre-fiction, often in knee-jerk, unconsidered ways, and while Oatley seems unimpressed with certain kinds of genre fiction, he also starts right out talking about fantasy classics like A Midsummer Night's Dream, and he approvingly discusses the way that the love potion in that play casts old questions about love into a new light by defamiliarizing them - so I would certainly say he is not anti-speculative-fiction across the board.)
I'll probably have a lot to say about other parts of the book later, but for now, I want to talk about this one quote that jumped out at me. In context, Oatley is talking about how different people feel different emotions when reading the same short story. He cites a study where participants were given a short story about a bad relationship. Then the participants were asked how they felt about the story. Some felt sad, some felt angry, some felt plenty of other things; they were also asked about their thoughts, mental images, and memories, anything that came to the surface while they were reading. Regardless of whether they'd actually experienced a situation like the one in the story before, each person reading a story had a rich experience where they associated fluidly among many kinds of thoughts, memories, and images.
The people in the study reported their thoughts in enough detail that certain cognitive styles could be discerned. Some people started with an image or event and thought backwards about what might have caused it; other people started with the same image or event and thought forwards about what it might lead to in the future. And each of these thinking styles - backwards or forwards - was significantly associated with a different emotional reaction to the story. It affected whether a reader felt sad about the bad relationship in the story or angry. Oatley writes:
In sadness, one searches backwards for reasons to explain the loss that has caused the sadness; among readers who became sad at the story the mode of reasoning was predominantly (and significantly) of backward chaining. In anger one looks forward in plans of asserting oneself against the person who has made one angry; among readers who became angry at the story, the mode of reasoning was predominantly (and significantly) forward chaining.
The terms "forward chaining" and "backward chaining" are familiar to me from, of all things, computer science. In programming, it refers to two ways a computer can solve a problem. It can start at the beginning and try out possible sequences of actions until it finds the right one; or it can start at the end and then reason backwards about what sequence of actions might lead to that outcome. Either approach is at least mostly workable for most problems but different kinds of problems will lend themselves more readily to one or the other.
Personally I find it difficult to become angry, either at real events or at fictional ones, even when they are quite unjust; Oatley’s study would suggest that I predominantly use backward chaining and think mostly about the causes of the things I see. I also suspect that, when I do use forward chaining, it goes to different places and different imagined future events that are not necessarily about confronting anyone. It seems logical that, for instance, fear might be associated with forward chaining - looking at an image or event, and then imagining what awful things it might lead to.
In any case, I feel that the takeaway for writers here isn't "here's how to make your reader feel sad" (nor is Oatley remotely interested in making that the takaway). Perhaps you can encourage backward chaining by, say, subtly connecting an image to a reminder of what went before it - but I suspect that such efforts can only succeed to a limited degree.
When a reader comes to your story they bring with them a whole set of experiences, beliefs, skills, and traits that you know little or nothing about. What they feel about your writing says as much about them as it does about you or your skill. Oatley's writing is very clear on this point - when a reader comes to a work of fiction they are creating their own simulation in their head, their own representation of the world you've tried to communicate with them, which will be as much their own as yours. You can't control that or constrain what the reader brings in. You can only try to make something sufficiently compelling that a good number of them will be interested in the process.