Coincidences in Your Plot

A short one for today.

What’s wrong with this picture?

“…the girl leaped out of the window and it just so happened that a mattress lay on the street so she was saved. As she got up, it just so happened that a gorgeous man was standing in front of her who helped her up. He’d just broken up with his wife and was looking for love. The two got married and lived happily ever after.”

 

Give your plot a better reason than:
"Why did this happen?"
"Because it just did, okay."

Yes, enough coincidences to make a bad romantic comedy or perhaps that movie The Ugly Truth started out as a sarcastic exercise like the paragraph above (my apologies to anyone who likes the movie).

So, how many coincidences are you allowed to have in your story?

ZERO…or perhaps one if you do it smartly.

A coincidence is just a warning sign that you were too lazy to come up with an actual reason for an incident. Yet you need your plot events to conspire in a way so that the resolution is a good one. Here’s how to handle those tricky coincidences:

Prepare the Audience

Problem: Mr. Evil Villain is strangulating Helpless Heroine when Estranged Brother just happens to walk into her house at that minute and is able to save her.

Fix: Have Estranged Brother look through old photos in a previous chapter and yearn to see Helpless Heroine once again.

Nothing in the outcome changes, but the events don’t sound so random now.

Follow Up

If you don’t want to prepare the foreground, then another good way to counter a coincidence is to follow it up with a plausible story.

Problem: After saving Helpless Heroine, Estranged Brother decides he needs to leave and isn’t seen in the plot ever again.

Fix: Estranged Brother saves her and Helpless Heroine and him patch up their relationship. Estranged Brother sticks around and helps her put Evil Villain behind bars at the climax.

 

This way even though it is a coincidence, it is well disguised. You prove that events in your book have consequences and don’t occur randomly.

Read or Watch Some Murder Mysteries

This genre is all about a murder planned right down to the last detail and one mistake bringing the whole thing tumbling down. I personally recommend Agatha Christie (ABC Murders and After the Funeral) because she deals with coincidences so deftly that often they’re too difficult to recognize.

A small side note: Watch Serendipity, a movie based entirely on coincidences, but doesn’t rely on lack of reasoning.

Learning from these can help you hide your coincidences and let your plot run smoothly as possible.