Coincidence is the earmark of Farce. Be careful how you employ it in more serious genres.
The reader is in both a bond and a contest with the writer in storytelling. The reader accepts that the writer is defining the world of the story, and will play fair (not cheat) with the given (genre) rules (unless that’s the point of the whole exercise). Thus, when the final story explanations and resolutions are seen to depend upon “information not in evidence” or “the critical clue/object/person coincidentally at hand”, the reader has reason to cry “foul”, and may never pick up that author again, not wishing to be cheated once more.
For the particular book I have in mind as an example of champion wall-flinging I offer an historical British Romance, (I try not to trash particular authors, so no name). The principle character (female) is introduced as having once rescued a very young mute climbing boy, taking him on as a “page”. She has (effectively) no other family, from the story’s point of view. In the course of the plot, she travels and meets the other principle character (male) who has had a complicated familial life, which includes various scandals and the loss of the family’s male child heir (presumed kidnapped/dead) to villainous in-family opponents.
Yes, that’s right. You don’t need to read anymore, do you? Nor did I, but I assumed that surely not… surely this author wasn’t just expecting that the reader would let her park the anomalous possession of a young mute servant by a single female as she then proceeded to show-and-tell us all about how very important the missing-and/or-presumed-dead heir was to her new love interest’s family. I persisted to the end just to see how clumsily my appalled suspicions would play out. (My reward was fodder for this article.)
But, yes, sigh the author really did do that, and constructed a search-and-rescue bravura ending to the kidnapped-again page-returned-to-his rightful family and the concluding romance of the adult principals. Of course she did…. sigh…
That’s not how this works, in story-telling.
In anything with a suspense setting (and, really, most storytelling has suspense in it), you have to take care how you introduce your significant players and props. If your audience is actual children, you can take the option of pointing out each clue as it goes by, so they can be introduced to the concept of “clues” and “suspense”, but we expect adults to neither need nor want that level of obviousness or reminders, that part of the pleasure is trying to figure out what will happen on our own.
So, an author who wants to play in that game has to slip in clues quietly, by making them something in the background or back story, something accidentally encountered, something that seems ordinary or unimportant, that just belongs there in the background, something that doesn’t raise suspicions in the reader who has just been introduced to the clue, even if the clue has a little unobtrusive hook of being remembered. That’s considered to be “playing fair” in any suspense genre.
If, say, the story depends upon the eventual finding of a lost treasure map, the clues to finding it have to slither into the story under some other guise, to mislead (the characters and) the reader, until the “ah-ha! Of course!” moment arrives in the story, the lost item becomes obviously located, and the reader tosses his head in the chagrin of not having guessed it before, or nods in the satisfaction of having nailed it.
If, instead, the necessary clue(s) just hang out and pulse in a neon frenzy (like the anomalous story character who has no other realistic explanation for existing in this tale), the reader has the choice of yawning or book-flinging. It’s one thing to make the reader wonder if X is a clue; it’s another thing altogether to be bored by repeated and obvious reminders about it.
There are genres which can be more forgiving in this area: The Unknown but Fated Hero Who Is Expected, or The Clue Hidden in Plain Sight-Only the Fools Are Oblivious. The problem isn’t really the hints about such a thing, but the improbability of the clumsy coincidence that makes the answer (much too soon) part of the story-so-far. What you really want when resolving this sort of suspense is a surprised reader (“what, this old thing/character is the important item? How did I miss that?”).
It’s enormously important when plotting out any suspense to keep track of every character/clue involved, and just how that information seeps through the story-characters’ as well as the reader’s attention. Plant your reveals early in the process and pay attention to watering them only softly, when they need it, so that they can bloom all the better in display at the payoff.
How do you keep this situation under control?
13 responses to “Coincidence is the enemy of suspense”
Hah! In the current work in progress – I have exactly that situation; of a pair of very young orphaned children, who are eventually located by distant next of kin – but all that is a small sub-plot, buried in the main narrative, of the older of the two (a boy) growing up and encountering all kinds of adventures in Gold-Rush era California. A couple of hints in old half-recalled memories, an inscription in a book … eventually I will bounce the whole MS off some beta readers to ensure that I have hidden the clues artfully enough.
For some reason, my thoughts leapt to H.M.S. Pinafore, which is a farce, plays it to the hilt, and the audience gleefully plays along. It works, because everyone knows that there will be a joke reveal at some point.
I tend not to have that sort of coincidence. My brain doesn’t work like that, and I come from history, which doesn’t have to make sense (see 1813 Battle of Leipzig for an example). Fiction doesn’t have the wiggle room history does. [crooked kitty smile]
I don’t have anything insightful in my head, so I’ll just leave a couple of semi-relevant Agatha Christie quotes here.
AI tells me that quote is from Murder on the Links.
AI is definitely wrong in this case. The quote refers to something that happened in Murder on the Links (Poirot finding a large pipe near the crime scene that everyone else dismissed as having been dropped by some workmen), but its from a different book, where Poirot is remembering those events.
How AI like.
I think the coincidence that doesn’t get seen, is the one that starts the whole book.
Umm, pardon the movie reference . . . R2D2 and C3PO crash within easy reach of exactly the help they need . . . I mean, really? A whole damned planet and they get captured and taken to the farm where an angsty teenage boy . . .
Usually, the earlier a coincidence is, the more leeway it gets, because it means not “a remarkable coincidence struck our hero,” but “a remarkable coincidence pushed our hero into a story.”
Take “The Materializing of Cecil” by L.M. Montgomery. The old maid heroine, being pitied at a sewing bee for never even having a beau, makes up an enormous whooper about having had one the one time she had been away from this village for any amount of time. There was nothing striking about her or the man she eventually marries before that.
Now Star Wars doesn’t have that excuse. Luke was significant before the coincidence. OTOH, perhaps the robots had some inkling of where Obi-Wan was?
His location could have been programmed into R2D2 and the Princess could have programmed the life pod to land near (on a planet scale) near where Obi-Wan might be.
Furthermore, that Obi-Wan was near Luke was *not* a coincidence.
Agree and Luke knew him.
You can’t resolve a story with a coincidence unless it’s a farce. The ending deus ex machina in Northanger Abbey is in the denouement — since we know that Henry Tilney and Catherine are capable of waiting until his father changes his mind, and we have already seen General Tilney change his mind twice on slight provocation, we know that something will happen, and if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else.
You can use one in the middle, but it is much wiser to play up how uncanny and unsettling it is. If the characters are at all religious — or superstitious — it may be taken as a sign.
I accidentally did that in my ‘Texas Navy’ series, but spread out over two books and a short story.