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odd_buttons) wrote2004-10-12 07:40 am
odd_buttons) wrote2004-10-12 07:40 am
Coincidence
The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Coincidence
A coincidence can make an intriguing premise. For example, a woman executive, happily married to a handsome airline pilot, goes to a business conference and meets, by chance, Dorcas, a red-haired girl she teased to cruelly throughout fourth grade that the girl transferred to another school.
Further coincidences, however, weaken plausibility. If it turns out that both women are competing for the same job, the story starts to sound contrived. Readers sense you're going to teach some moral lesson, or set up a clever twist. It's even more problematic if you resolve the story by another coincidence -- the women talk together and realize they're both married to the same man! Your readers have been betrayed. You created a world they were willing to take seriously, but then you relied on a trick to end the story.
If coincidence is meant to play a part in your story you can forestall criticism by building the coincidence into the premise of the fiction. We are not surprised that two couples end up at the same resort if it is established early that the resort is where people of a certain class traditionally stay. If the town is small enough, we know their lives might have intertwined before. Carefully done, coincidences can seem more inevitable than contrived.
Deus ex machina is the Latin term for implausible coincidences and mechanical surprises that are invented by writers to make their plots come out a certain way, generally to satisfy the sentimental hopes of the audience. It's the bolt of lightening that causes the horse to rear up and toss the villain over the cliff, the flash flood that reveals the vein of gold to the loving couple.
In farce and comedy, though, outrageous coincidences and deus ex machine inventions are often part of the fun. Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is full of fortuitous rescues, unfortunate misunderstandings, and surprise meetings that both complicate an ultimately resolve the plot. Charles Dickens and other nineteenth-century writers use coincidence to bring novels to closure. In Oliver Twist, characters whom Oliver stumbles on by chance turn out to be related to him in significant ways and everyone is rewarded or punished appropriately. Realistic fiction in the late nineteenth century rejected these neatly tied up packages of fiction as artificial and mechanical.
But coincidences, deftly handled, are sources of surprise and delight. Writers who want to preserve the magical elements of storytelling continue to make use of this tradition with energy and imagination. E. L. Doctorow, in Ragtime, has the lives of his characters crisscross over decades. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 makes coincidence its subject.
See Beginnings, Poetic Justice, Premise, Suspension of Disbelief.
Coincidence
A coincidence can make an intriguing premise. For example, a woman executive, happily married to a handsome airline pilot, goes to a business conference and meets, by chance, Dorcas, a red-haired girl she teased to cruelly throughout fourth grade that the girl transferred to another school.
Further coincidences, however, weaken plausibility. If it turns out that both women are competing for the same job, the story starts to sound contrived. Readers sense you're going to teach some moral lesson, or set up a clever twist. It's even more problematic if you resolve the story by another coincidence -- the women talk together and realize they're both married to the same man! Your readers have been betrayed. You created a world they were willing to take seriously, but then you relied on a trick to end the story.
If coincidence is meant to play a part in your story you can forestall criticism by building the coincidence into the premise of the fiction. We are not surprised that two couples end up at the same resort if it is established early that the resort is where people of a certain class traditionally stay. If the town is small enough, we know their lives might have intertwined before. Carefully done, coincidences can seem more inevitable than contrived.
Deus ex machina is the Latin term for implausible coincidences and mechanical surprises that are invented by writers to make their plots come out a certain way, generally to satisfy the sentimental hopes of the audience. It's the bolt of lightening that causes the horse to rear up and toss the villain over the cliff, the flash flood that reveals the vein of gold to the loving couple.
In farce and comedy, though, outrageous coincidences and deus ex machine inventions are often part of the fun. Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is full of fortuitous rescues, unfortunate misunderstandings, and surprise meetings that both complicate an ultimately resolve the plot. Charles Dickens and other nineteenth-century writers use coincidence to bring novels to closure. In Oliver Twist, characters whom Oliver stumbles on by chance turn out to be related to him in significant ways and everyone is rewarded or punished appropriately. Realistic fiction in the late nineteenth century rejected these neatly tied up packages of fiction as artificial and mechanical.
But coincidences, deftly handled, are sources of surprise and delight. Writers who want to preserve the magical elements of storytelling continue to make use of this tradition with energy and imagination. E. L. Doctorow, in Ragtime, has the lives of his characters crisscross over decades. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 makes coincidence its subject.
See Beginnings, Poetic Justice, Premise, Suspension of Disbelief.
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