One complaint I often hear about plots is that coincidences come too frequently, or they’re unbelievable. Coincidences in fiction makes readers mad, even though they might have actually happened.
My example: Way back in 1982, my former wife and I were dining with another couple at The Shed, a steakhouse in Dallas. It was the new In eatery that everyone had to experience. Of course since it was new, the place was packed that particular night and we had to wait nearly an hour to be seated in one of the smaller dining areas off the main room. It didn’t matter, I liked the smaller area that wasn’t as noisy.
Even though my friend was a cop, I was sitting with my back against the wall with a view of the door and a dozen tables. A foursome composed of two distinct generations came in, an older couple and a pair of young folks who looked to be around eighteen or nineteen.
The young lady in a cream-colored sweater and her escort sat facing us, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the dark-haired woman. It became so awkward on my part, that I had to purposefully engage those around me so I wouldn’t stare, something that had never happened to me before.
Halfway through the meal, the young woman and her beau had a disagreement that caught my attention. The older man with them patted the air to quiet the young couple down, and the girl rose and walked out. She returned a few minutes later and all was well. The foursome finished the meal in quiet conversation.
I confess, I kept sneaking glances at the dark-eyed young lady until we paid out and left. As we walked by their table, I took one last glance at her when she smiled at the older couple, and we were gone.
Thirty years later, the Bride and I were sitting by the pool one late evening, drinking wine and talking about our past before we met. Since she grew up in a small town about forty miles from where I did in Old East Dallas, the conversation drifted to the Dallas clubs that used to line Greenville Avenue, a hotspot for the Baby Boomers such as us. In fact, I was born on this date way back in 1954, one of the earlier Boomers, and she came long ten years later almost to the day, as the last of our generation, and will celebrate her birthday on the 29th.
WIth this almost exact ten-year difference in our ages, (and by the way, our 26th anniversary is on her birthday, only three days from now) but we’ve found we share similar memories of that time in the ‘80s before we met.
The music playing through our outside speakers helped recall those days and one song reminded me of a place I enjoyed. “Hey, do you remember Spaghetti Warehouse out on I-35?”
Her white teeth flashed in the fading light. “My high school boyfriend took me there before we went dancing at Bell Star.”
“You had to be twenty-one to get into Bell Star.”
She gave me a look over the top of her glass. “I’ve heard.”
“Man, there were some great clubs and restaurants down there back then. The Longhorn Ballroom, Whiskey River, The Western Place. I loved The Old San Fransciso Streakhouse –––.”
“With the girl on the swing over the bar!” Her eyes lit up at the recollection.
“Yep, but my favorite was Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine.” The Dallas restaurant on the only hill in Dallas (and that’s a stretch to say) had a great view of the Trinity River down below, and about a million cars stuck in traffic jams off of I-35.
“I liked it, too. Especially the cheese soup.”
“That reminds me, did you ever eat at The Shed? It was a steak house in North Dallas.”
“I loved that place. My parents used to take me there–––.”
My head spun and my breath caught. I was back in That Place, staring across the restaurant at my future wife. “You were there with them and someone else once. You were wearing a cream sailor’s sweater.”
Her expression was one of shock. “I did wear that sweater when they took me and my boyfriend out to eat one time. We broke up a year later, but how did you know? ”She tilted her head and took another sip. “I’ve never told you that story.”
“Didn’t have to.” I described the scene as she nodded and listened with a frown across her forehead. “I was there and couldn’t take my eyes off of you from across the room. Y’all had a disagreement and you got up and left.”
“We sure did. He was back from college and I’d just graduated. It was the beginning of the end for us.”
For the next hour we talked about that night, how I was taken with her almost to the point of embarrassment, though I have to admit, she hadn’t noticed me at all. We talked of our lives with other people for the next eight years until a mutual friend introduced us in Austin and we married another eight years later.
It was an unbelievable coincidence, and when I used it in a manuscript, my agent urged me to take it out. “I love the story It’s too unbelievable in a book.”
“But it really happened.”
“You readers won’t like it, or believe it’s possible.”
I found out she was right once again as I went down a rabbit hole of research concerning reality and fiction. In real life, coincides are seriously cool, but in the worlds we create, the same rules simply don’t apply. Constant or poor coincidences are startling to readers, and their ability to suspend disbelief (though we always do that in fiction) can draw them out of the plot and drive ’em to complain in two-star reviews. Readers hate sudden, lazy coincides.
However, on the flip side, that interesting confluence of people and events works at the beginning of a novel because technically, all stories start with a coincidence as….
…two men just happen to be fishing under a bridge one night when the body of a woman drops into the water and the story takes off. (John D. MacDonald in Darker Than Amber). It worked so well that particular Travis McGee novel eventually wound up on the big screen, and I know, because I saw some of it at a drive-in theater one night in 1970…never mind.
But if such a thing happens at the end of your novel, when the antagonist is about to shoot the protagonist under that same bridge and another body falls on his gun hand and saving our hero’s life, then you’ll hear about it. I guarantee.
These Rules That Aren’t tend to apply more to thrillers and mysteries. If you’re writing fantasy, horror, or romance, then you can get away with it, because it seems that readers of these genres are more open to fate and such similar interactions.
Come to think of it, maybe I can go back and dust off that old manuscript and dabble in romance for a while. Anyway, careful what you create in the way of falling bodies or chance meetings, and let reality and past memories rest for quiet discussion some night over wine.
I don’t allow coincidences in my fiction – readers won’t believe them because they’re too convenient.
But I need a solution to a problem in the WIP which is going to ‘help’ someone make a decision someone else wants – and I’m going to manufacture a fake coincidence, and let the effect of it be my solution.
Why? Because the person involved shouldn’t be asked to participate – it leaves too many loose ends. Power in the wrong hands. I’m pretty sure it will work (though you never know until you write it). More The Sting.
Here’s where I get off script. I don’t mind coincidences, even though they’re too convenient. I don’t believe I’ve ever read a book and thought, “I don’t believe that could happen.”
I’m like John’s comment below. I believe my guardian angel has kept me from harm or incidents far too many times to count. Once I Colorado, I was right behind a car (and don’t remember the details about that vehicle), but all of a sudden I needed to get a snack. I pulled into a convenience store, was in there only a minute, and got back on the road. A couple of miles later, I came up on that same car that had been involved in a bad accident, as well as one that had rear-ended them. I should have been that car.
Coincidence?
Something made you uneasy – you just don’t know what. That’s not uncommon. Glad you gave in to the intuitive need to get off the road rather than trail this car.
Coincidence is the “source” of many conspiracy theories, it would seem…
…implausible deniabilities – or undeniable implausibilities – as it were…
…too many, “It just so happens…” events for things to unwind in the way they do…
A short list, without running down the rabbits of (anti-) social other media:
◾ assassinations…
◾ armed conflicts…
◾ romantic affairs…
◾ financial wheeling-n-dealing…
◾ political chicanery…
◾ social events…
◾ environmental catastrophes
◾ sudden disappearances…
◾ dare I say pandemics…???
It must be a mindset that some – if not most – things don’t just happen on their own… that the “butterfly effect” is a purposefully caused event to purposely form el Nino or Hurricane Katrina or the fall of the Roman Empire or… or… or…
My Bride says there’s no such thing as coincidence. She maintains it’s all pre-ordained, and I can’t argue that.
Happy Birthdays and Anniversary, Rev, to you and your bride!
But I gotta ask–did she really change that much in the ensuing eight years that you didn’t recognize her when you met?
I probably wouldn’t recognize the guy I was engaged to in college if he rang the front doorbell but that’s been 50+ years.
The cynical lawyer in my series always says, “There are no coincidences.” Plot events that at first appear to be coincidental are later explained as the villain’s behind-the-scene manipulations.
But I took a chance once with three relatives having a similar strange dream that brings them together. So far, no one’s squawked about that. Whew!
Ha! Thinking back, I knew “something” the moment a friend introduced us in 1990, just like I “knew” something back in ’82. She hadn’t changed much at all, now that I look at old pictures where she had a Dorothy Hamill haircut and that softer high school face. When we finally met, her hair was on her shoulders and BIG.
As I said at first, it’s the coincidence that starts the story, but I believe we’re all overthinking this, which is what writers tend to do.
This can be a thorny issue when planning a series, too. I have a historical series I want to write that involves a bit more complex plot and evolves over time and people. As part of that, I want the protag in a later book to come across the relative of someone they knew/were acquaintances with in childhood–in a different part of the country. A much smaller U.S. population at the time, but still, I’ve wrestled with whether it will seem like too much coincidence.
But I really want to make it happen. There are a couple of plot difficulties in that particular series I have in mind but the thing is, I just can’t give up on it. I’m gonna write those books. I’ve still got homework to do on the research aspect to help with the plot problems, but the idea will just not let me go. And I’m gonna be so tickled when I’m done, even if I’m the only one who ever reads them!
Brenda, that doesn’t seem terribly far-fetched at all. If the story won’t let you go, that’s a strong indication you should write it. If it’s set up well, you won’t need to justify it.
That was nowhere as evident as in the Joh Jakes “Bicentennial” series, as subsequent generations in the “Kent Family Chronicles” were in nearly every major historical event in US history from the Revolution to the Alamo to Gettysburg…
Eventually the series began to lose “credibility” in this fictional retelling of our national story…
The Forrest Gumps of historical fiction.
Yeah, now that I can’t get behind. It’s too much of plot manipulation. I do have a serialized novella starting next month in a publication entitled, Saddlebag Dispatches. It’s a crossover western/twilight zone story in which the combination of two people and a strange walking cane thrusts unsuspecting victims back into the past via visions, and I confess, the first is at the Little Bighorn and the second encounter is the Alamo, but the “victims” involved are never standout historical figures like Custer or Crockett. I couldn’t make myself do that.
During my three decades of non-writing career, I investigated hundreds of accidents of various levels of severity, and I can tell you for a fact that coincidence plays a huge role in everything that happens in our lives–both good and bad. If you’d been one person further back in the 7-Eleven line when you were buying your morning coffee, then you wouldn’t have been in the intersection five minutes and thirty seconds later at the instant that crazy driver blasted through the red light.
If you hadn’t gotten distracted by the doorbell, then you would have gone through with your plan to put the new batteries in the smoke detector when the batteries were still in your hand.
And if I hadn’t agreed to work for a coworker that day, I wouldn’t have been standing behind the counter when my future husband walked in on his lunch hour.
🙂
So why are we urged not to use them?
Writers are usually allowed one big coincidence. That usually starts the plot. These days, I’ve read so many novels where the main character intones “There are no coincidences” after something reeking of writer laziness happens. All the characters will nod and move on.
My coincidence story. In Durham, NC, my sister-in-law was in a copy shop making a much larger copy of a picture of my dad from WWII. A man nearby glanced at the picture and says in a plummy English accent, “I was flown all over England in a plane like that. My pilot was an American working with the RAF. Lovely man. He named his plane ‘Lois’ after his wife.”
Shocked, my SIL handed him the picture. My uniformed dad was standing in front of his small plane named “Lois.” SIL had a few nice anecdotes to take back to my brother.
Those kind of things raises the hair on the back of my neck! I LOVE stories like that.
Coincidence or small world?
Oftentimes two words for the same thing…
That small world thing is real! You wouldn’t believe how many times that kind of things has happened to me and the Bride. I always marvel at those instances.
Happy Birthday to you and your bride.
Many years ago I was traveling to Houston from Tennessee with a group. We pulled out of the drive and the driver realized he’d left something he want to take with him. At first he said, it didn’t matter, then we talked him into turning around and getting it.
Once again we started on our journey and just to be flagged down. Five minutes earlier a log truck had lost it load of logs in the curve. It happened right were we should have been if we hadn’t turned around. Now when something happens to delay me instead of fretting I’m thankful, figuring the delay probably saved me from something bad.
Oh, and Happy Birthday and Happy Anniversary!
When my dad, suffering from moderate dementia, was at the senior center, anothe man was showing pictures of his WWII experiences. My dad looked at the picture of the ship (he was a merchant marine) and said, “I was on that ship.” Turns out the two of them had served together, and that man retold the story at my dad’s funeral.
Terry, my dad was a merchant seaman, too! My sister still has the wooden shoes he brought us when I was a kid.