Three Ways to Make Coincidences Work in Your Fiction
In stories and in life, coincidences make order out of chaos — but they can feel artificial. Here’s how to weave them into a story.
Fiction is a series of coincidences. What would ordinarily happen in between events falls away, so what we are left with is the well-organized form of a plot.
First published in Writers Ask, number 54, 2011.
There was a night long ago when my sister, the über party girl, tried to get me to attend a concert at a cool-kids’ club in San Diego. The band on schedule had had some alternative hits and built a cult following. But I chose to stay in my grim little apartment and read.
Over a decade and a half later, after I’d moved back and forth across the country a couple of times and landed in Richmond, Virginia, I sat at lunch with a colleague, eating fried chicken and telling anecdotes about my flamboyant, daring, crazy sister, Krishna, who —
“Wait,” he said. “You have a sister named Krishna?”
I said yes, but that was not the point.
“And she lives in San Diego? A blonde?”
I complained that he wasn’t even listening to my story; he’d been distracted.
He pushed back his plate and declared, “I’ve met her!”
It turned out he had been the drummer in the band that night. He remembered my sister introducing herself and inviting the guys to a party at her place (a party I also did not attend; I was probably in bed by then).
We were fascinated by the coincidence. Beguiled. We’d already known each other for over a year, in vastly different lives, and here it turned out we were connected long before that in what seemed a deeply significant way. Some great power wanted us to meet, even if we’d missed it that first time. We were, in short, living in a novel.
Fiction is a series of such coincidences. What would ordinarily happen in between events falls away, so what we are left with is the well-organized form of a plot.
But making them work where readers have already been trained to feel skeptical — that requires a delicate balance and skill, just like riding a wave on a surfboard.
Coincidences point to the overall patterning and structuring in fiction. Every story is constructed; every event is planned and selected from the infinite possibilities rippling through your brain. You choose the ones that will make a statement when they’re put together — that have enough in common to, yes, coincide.
A coincidence works — and becomes important — because of what follows it. If the coincidence just a passing incident, it might feel forced, but if it becomes a key part of the story’s plot, it has to feel inevitable.
In short: Coincidence creates order within the chaos of our cluttered world and unpredictable lives; it establishes a sense of importance, that some things are Meant To Be.
Coincidental Finesse
But coincidences require some finessing. The storyteller’s art lies in casting shadow and light over them so the plot doesn’t feel contrived.
I worked hard to naturalize a coincidence in my novel The Kingdom of Little Wounds. In a sort of dark Renaissancey fairy tale, a seamstress, an enslaved nurse, and a historian must cross paths in the palace courtyard a little after midnight. They all have reasons for being there, of course, but I have to make those reasons work together.
So here are a few strategies:
First, there’s the shadow of distraction. I think of Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd — a clever and tricky mystery that gives just enough concrete detail to make a wild set of coincidences work.
In a genre that’s all about turning the chaos of crime into the order of its solution, Christie offers the description of a wooded lane near the village, Hercule Poirot’s frustrated attempt to grow vegetable marrows, and charts of the house and room where the rich man is found murdered — all bits that chime with a real world recognizable to the reader or are so quirky and unpredictable that they distract us from how tidily everything is falling into place.
Christie makes it possible for you to get so swept up into this world of tangible detail and tantalizing clues that you don’t notice how extraordinary it is to find, all in one night, a mother reunited with her illegitimate son; a wastrel stepchild having a passionate argument with his secretly beloved parlormaid; a skulking butler bent on blackmail, and, oh yes, the murder of that rich man himself. By some sleight of hand, Christie earns her coincidences.
Second, there’s the light of open acknowledgment. Some of the cleverest authors don’t strain to hide the fact that there’s an odd chord striking in the music of the spheres; they point out the crazy ways our lives are connected.
Having a character remark on the unbelievability actually makes it more plausible, as when E. M. Forster explains (in A Room with a View) that it’s both strange and natural for a group of middle-class English people to cross paths first in Italy and then in an English village — it’s because they all love Italian art. The acknowledgment of implausibility breaks that sense of too much order and lets chaotic “real” life creep back into the story, even if the coincidence is easily explained away.
Or there’s metafictional awareness. Sometimes, in the great stylists’ hands, fate can actually become a character, or a character can stand in for fate. In Lolita, for example, Vladimir Nabokov (no matter what you think of him, he is a great stylist and an early postmodernist) plants a name that points to the great patterning in our lives: Aubrey McFate. McFate first appears in a list of Lolita’s classmates, later to become a part of the plot. When Humbert Humbert’s hapless wife discovers a diary that reveals his forbidden passion for her daughter, she runs out to mail a letter that will ruin everything for him — and is hit by a neighbor’s car before she reaches the mailbox. “Precise fate, that synchronizing phantom,” has struck.
Isn’t this just another one of those strange things, Nabokov seems to say, the way it all happens to fall into place here? And isn’t it just like life?
This sort of strategy can come off heavyhanded unless you use similar postmodern techniques elsewhere.
Speaking of falling into place, back to my co-worker and me.
Coincidence did work magic in real life. Enchanted by the idea of the night on which we should have met, and the delightful coincidence of finding each other on the other side of the continent, we fell in love. And in 2014, at a farmhouse over a century old, we got married.
Some things really are Meant To Be.
