Kath here. Editor and friend of WU Dave King (co-author of the must-have book for writers, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print) emailed:
Recently, Ruth (Julian) and I have been seeing coincidence crop up a lot in our personal reading. We talked about it, and soon we had an article – 375 words on how skilled writers handle coincidence in their plots.
Luckily, he passed along their article for our readers. Thanks, Dave!
What a Coincidence
Coincidence is the Get Out of Jail Free card of story creation. The small, artificial worlds in which most stories take place often make coincidence not only plausible, but unavoidable. Because your cast can only be so big, some characters have to tie together in more ways than you’d expect in the real world. So, when you’ve plotted yourself into a corner or want to spring a surprise on your readers, just have a character run into an old acquaintance with key information or stumble across a random fact that changes everything.
But push coincidence too far, and readers start to see the machinery of your plot creaking along. Unless you find some plausible reason to account for it.
You could, for instance, make the coincidence part of your protagonist’s character. When Reginald Hill’s detective Joe Sixsmith stumbles across two people connected to the same crime, someone is bound to mention that Sixsmith’s has a gift for attracting that sort of thing. Carola Dunn simply gives her Daisy Dalrymple an Indian friend who thinks it’s her karma to have a friend who is always finding bodies.
Another way to explain the prevalence of corpses in all those amateur sleuth series is to ground the coincidence so firmly in the details of the unfolding story that readers will ignore the body count of the series as a whole. It’s an open secret that this genre’s main attraction is its heroine/hero, not its plausibility, so readers are willing suspend a heaping helping of disbelief for the sake of a favorite character’s latest adventure.
Or coincidence could be part of your setting, as in Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie books. As Isabel often says, Edinburgh (real-life population, about a half million) is really a small town. So it’s no wonder she keeps running into total strangers who are connected to one another and to whatever thread she’s following at the moment.
It’s no accident that all these examples confront the issue openly. Unacknowledged coincidence can easily sabotage a plot, a criticism Agatha Christie often faced. But she was relying on the dying convention that fueled so many Dickensian confections of coincidence. The more innocent readers of Victorian times swallowed it whole.
Nowadays it would stand out like a bustle. And be rejected just as fast.
About Dave King
Dave King is the co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a best-seller among writing books. An independent editor since 1987, he is also a former contributing editor at Writer's Digest. Many of his magazine pieces on the art of writing have been anthologized in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing and in The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic. You can check out several of his articles and get other writing tips on his website.
Or you could make coincidence required in the setting, as in The Wheel of Time series. The main characters are ta’veren, people around whom the Wheel weaves the Age Lace and creates the Pattern. These people metaphysically cause coincidence.
Haha…Sam took the words right out of my mouth. I could never decide if the ta’veren in Wheel of Time were utterly awesome, or just laziness on Jordan’s part. Could be both, I suppose.
Definitely too many coincidences will start to stand out (at least to contemporary readers) as implausible. And once you lose credibility with your reader, you’re done for!
Isn’t it funny how drawing attention to the thing that sticks out most often makes it more acceptable? :P
Agreed! Also, I am SO FAR away from the skill level of being able to write a believable coincidence that it would probably come off as a joke. I think part of the issue they would be rejected today is that coincidences in general are harder to come by with technology predicting everything and always knowing where people are.
WU SIDE-NOTE: This new animal captcha thing is the ugliest dog/sea lion creature I’ve ever seen…I kind of want to adopt him…
I do some editing and critique work, and I’ve noticed that some authors tend to fall into coincidence when they have a plot that they can’t quite sort out. It takes coincidence to fill in the logical gaps. Hell, I’ve done that in the past, too! Unfortunately, it winds up taking a lot of explanation, and it ultimately doesn’t work. Most often, the solution is to get back to basics, and see if there’s a more direct route.
And I was just joking about Jessica Fletcher’s unfailing ability to find dead people. I mean, wouldn’t they stop inviting her to writer’s conferences after a while? ;)
An author should allow herself one coincidence per book, if that.
One trick I like is that the seeming coincidences are often the machinations of the bad guy. Usually, the reader knows this, but the main character does not.
All those coincidences aren’t moving the main character toward a solution but toward a cliff she’ll be shoved off of.
I really like the “small town” (and by extension, small world) concept when it comes to coincidence. We all have a few stories that either have occurred to us personally or those close to us. Still being a naive, newbie writer, I’ve not had the “luxury” of needing coincidence, but when I do, I’m opting for the small world approach! ;)
I’m cosigning what Marilynn said. If a coincidence makes things too easy for the protagonist it feels like a cheat, but if it gets her into more danger, bring it on! Of course, I love to torture my characters.
I’ve heard there’s a negativity bias — people will believe a coincidence if it appears to be bad luck for the protagonist.
I’ve found that coincidences fail when they’re used to help the protag get out of trouble or solve their problem. When they’re plot points, not just nudges to get the characters where they need to be either emotionally or mentally.
Characters shouldn’t rely on luck to win. The harder is it, the more interesting the story usually is.
I’d believe what Tamara said about a negativity bias; I think people are more likely to remember the bad coincidences that happen to them, and thus have an easier time accepting a negative coincidence with “Of course that would happen!”
Everyone’s making really good points in the comments today! Like anything, a coincidence can work, but it takes a lot of skill to pull off well, and usually functions better if it’s later revealed not to be a coincidence at all.
How interesting to read about the complexities of coincidence!
So very wise! Coincidence that has been well-grafted into a plot can be a thing of beauty. But when it’s been thrown-in by the writer to fix or move a story that’s run into a wall, it hits readers as lazy and careless writing. As Dave has said so much better:
“But push coincidence too far, and readers start to see the machinery of your plot creaking along. Unless you find some plausible reason to account for it.”
Coincidence — with caution!
I addressed this same issue at my blog on Monday — what a coincidence! Things that happen all the time in real life don’t necessarily work for fiction. They have to be crafted carefully, and if they’re the solution to the plot problem, then they won’t work.
Terry
I find this to be very interesting blog and the first thing that sprung to mind was Nancy Drew, followed closely by my fiance, Jonathan (bear with me here, it will make sense in a second). I loved Nancy Drew as a child, but even then I would think “How the heck does one person stumble on all these mysteries, one after the other? What are the chances???” The way I got around this was to come to the conclusion that she was just the type of person who noticed strange things, and followed clues, that other people overlooked. She was simply more tuned in to these things. What does this have to do with Jonathan? He’s a crap-magnet, to put it delicately. He and I are both EMTs, but he is constantly coming across accidents, fires, sick people, suicide attempts, and the list literally goes on for miles. I NEVER come across these things, unless I’m with him. Why? Well, for one he has a scanner in his car so he hears about every call in the county. He has lights and EMT stickers on his car and often wears clothing that identifies him as an EMT, so people immediately know to run to him if there’s a problem (he puts that stuff on my car and I immediately take it back off, ha!) He also puts himself in situations I simply refuse to put myself in. I used to think he had the worst luck, but I’ve come to realize he brings these things to his life. I think in writing, especially a series, having the person’s personality itself being the reason behind the coincidences would solve virtually all problems of disbelief on the part of the reader.
I love this. So an apparent coincidence can actually be a result of actions we’ve taken, several steps removed (wasn’t that the premise behind The Secret?). Pulling off a believable coincidence in fiction would still be tricky using this approach, but it could certainly work in the right story.