Month: December 2020

Start of a New Chapter

Fallton Havenstonne

The start of a new chapter in a book should pull us into the story. It should keep the tension and suspense of the last chapter present–activate the unknowns of the plot to engage our curiosity–to keep reading.

When this doesn’t happen, it’s as if the writer is just going through the motions, isn’t even trying to grab our attention. This might work well in a book that has dramatic cliff hangers, but not for stories where it starts off with a completely new scene where nothing dramatic or tense is happening.

Even though the first few lines of a new chapter should set the tone, there should be something unsettling or intriguing about it. It’s fine to describe the setting and the atmosphere, but it should be followed by something gripping–throw us into a conflict. Once that happens, we’ll keep turning the pages.

Personally, I don’t want to dog-ear the start of a new chapter, which is what I usually do. My rule of thumb is to read a chapter or two before taking break. When I’m bored or disinterested, I’ll forget all the details–the character names, the locations, etc. But I’ll keep reading if the new chapter is powerful enough. In that case, the story is playing like a movie inside my mind, and it’s one of the great pleasures about reading.

Sasquatch Mine And Other Stories

Fallton Havenstonne
In this collection of short stories, get ready for four stories that explore how strange and mysterious the world can be.

In Sasquatch Mine, a cancer causing pollutant has contaminated the world’s water supply. Years later, Landen is desperate to find clean water, especially since there’s barely any left. One night, he follows a man that knows where to get it. But will Landen survive the night in Sasquatch Mine?

In The Robber, Lacy’s day turns upside down during a traffic stop. In The Invaders, Earth’s last hope rests on a man with a special ability. And in Impulse, a robot has some unusual idiosyncrasies.

My new short story collection, Sasquatch Mine And Other Stories, is available on Amazon. It has 4 short stories including Sasquatch Mine, The Robber, The Invaders, and Impulse. Happy reading!

Cause and Effect

Fallton Havenstonne

Cause and effect is something that is essentially common sense to us, something that is seemingly self-evident. But years ago, I read a book by the philosopher David Hume called An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that challenged this notion.

His argument was that cause and effect was a habit of experience, and therefore, cause and effect weren’t in the actual objects or events themselves. To say one object caused another to move, for example, was just a pattern of experience we’ve become accustomed to. There’s nothing to say that it will always happen. So if that is the case, wouldn’t that mean the objects outside of us didn’t have any firm qualities, since they are contingent upon our experience?

That was Hume’s point: objects outside of our experience have a nature that is unknowable.

But we could counter this by arguing that experience is simply a means of knowing the outside world (not an end in itself), just as a microscope is a means of knowing the microbial world, and that cause and effect is inherent in the way the universe operates, since our reason has determined that to be so. Similarly, Newton’s Laws of Motion describe the rules that govern, or are inherent, in the way objects move and react to each other in the universe. Thus, experience isn’t everything. We need our reason to figure things out too.

Even though our experience gives us access to the world, we make sense of it by the principles and laws that govern it. These principles allow us to understand the world and to make predictions and calculations about it (i.e. how long it takes to get from point A to point B, how much weight a bridge can hold, etc.). If we denied the validity of reason, we couldn’t operate or function in the world, since we wouldn’t know truths that exist and can be applied universally.