Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

Or, Why No Coincidences Can Happen in Story

We’ve all heard it and probably lived it – something that happens in real life that is so improbable we would never believe it if we hadn’t “seen” it. Like that viral video of the young kayaker swallowed and then spit out by a whale.

Put that in a story and you’ve got to make it utterly believable by leading up to the improbable moment of consumption through a long series of likely events. (Moby Dick, anyone?) In fiction, there are no coincidences – we want the reader to suspend disbelief.

The most important consideration for moving your plot forward and keeping your reader on the page is – does this follow? Does the event/scene I’m writing logically follow what preceded it?

This is cause-and-effect, and it is what drives every good story. Not coincidence.

Let’s Look at How Cause-and-Effect Works

In every scene the point of view character has a scene goal, takes action, runs into conflict, runs into failure, and then during the summary, reflects on this state of affairs in order to move to a clearer way to attain their goal and desire and a happy ending.

Meet Jim and Carol, characters in a romance novel.

Let’s assume that Jim has a crush on Carol and hopes he can ask her on a date. That date, he hopes, will lead to a romance; that romance, he dreams, will lead to a life-long partnership; that partnership leads to children and a center-hall colonial; and so on. For the purposes of Jim’s story, let’s assume that his internal desire is to find love. His external goal is to win Carol’s heart, even though she doesn’t really know him yet.

If I were writing this romance, I’d uncover Jim’s flaws that might lead him to act stupidly and awkwardly, and I’d uncover Carol’s misguided attractions to the wrong sort of guy. These are the kinds of things that can create the necessary misunderstandings.

In each scene I’d create some kind of action, then because of that action, some kind of problem that leads to conflict, that leads to failure to reach the romantic goal. The pivotal word in every cause-and-effect is because. We need this mechanism to make a story meaningful, scene by scene.

There is a certain rationality to cause and effect. In stories that employ strong cause and effect, life is not a meaningless, random series of events that are out of our control, but a totally controllable series of events that we make happen until we learn not to. Thus, there is great comfort in stories that employ good cause and effect.

We actually feel that solutions to problems large and small are within the grasp of the characters we read – therefore within our grasp, as well.

For Example, In Our Romance…

Let’s dissect the story about Jim and Carol. Jim is a bit of a bumbler but a truly nice guy, and Carol has been drawn to someone else because he’s suave and attractive, but she doesn’t feel confident in herself.

Jim decides that he’ll invite her to a show. He buys the tickets and leaves them in an envelope on her desk at work, but in his haste and bumbling awkwardness, he fails to put his name on the envelope, so she doesn’t know the tickets are from him. Because he fails to put his name on the envelope, another guy in the office, Tom, stops by Carol’s desk and flirts with her, and she assumes Tom gave her the tickets, which he, being a jerk, doesn’t deny. Carol ends up announcing that she’s going to the show with Tom (even though he’s a jerk), leaving Jim to feel the keen sting of loss.

This happens in a single scene, in the office.

· One little oversight leads to a potentially big setback.

· And that setback leads to another, because Jim buys another ticket to the show for himself and catches Tom kissing Carol in the back row (scene 2);

· because Jim sees the kiss, he confronts Tom in the lobby and socks him in the nose (scene 3);

· because Jim socks Tom, Jim is arrested for assault (scene 4);

· because Jim is arrested Carol wants nothing to do with Jim, even after she knows Tom is a jerk and Jim is really a good guy (scene 5+); and so on.

Every romance ever written follows this kind of trajectory, scene by scene.

Further, scene by scene, you want to make each conflict bigger than the one before, even if just by a little. Kiss leads to sock in the nose leads to arrest, and so on. Until the climax, where the main character finally handles something perfectly, defeats the antagonistic force (whatever is standing in the way of the lovers – in this case Tom, and the natures of both Jim and Carol), and the story concludes with a happily ever after.

The key is to find a plausible reason for each thing in every scene to happen, and to happen at the hands of the point of view character. No coincidences; no bad luck; no responses that aren’t stimulated by an action. The character performs an action that clearly grows out of who they are and what they’ve done before, and because of that action, something else happens that raises the stakes.

Because truth is truly stranger than fiction, which shouldn’t feel strange at all.

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