The challenge facing every author of a novel or short story is best captured in a cartoon I saw years ago: the writer is seated at his computer, and on the wall behind him is a sign reading: “10 Days without a Contrived Coincidence to Forward the Plot!”
This universal author’s dilemma was perfectly captured by Mark Twain, who wrote ““Truth is stranger than fiction, but that is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” (Mark Twain, Following the Equator)
As Twain recognized, the real world is filled with remarkable stories of coincidence–such as identical twins separated at birth who reunite on a train in France after the confused conductor tells one of them that he thought he just took her passenger ticket two cars back, or that poor farmer about to have the family farm repossessed who stops at a 7-11 for a Big Gulp, buys a Powerball ticket with his last dollar, puts in his wife’s birthday, and, lo and behold, wins $25 million. Yes, but try to use one of those examples as the climactic ending of your novel and the reader will slam it shut in disgust. Fortunately, your editor would never have allowed it in the first place. “But this really happened!” you tell her. “So what?” she responds, “This is fiction, not reality.”
Or perhaps you write a short story about a scandal over a Congressman who sent lewd photos of his genitals to young women. You give him the last name of Weiner. “Change it,” your editor insists. “But there really was a Congressman named Weiner,” you respond. “So what? A guy named Weiner sexting pics of his wiener? This is fiction. No one will believe it.”
But here’s a secret known to novelists, screenwriters, and playwriters: all fictional plots are built upon coincidence. The key, we authors learn, is to disguise the coincidence. But if you strip away that disguise and get down to the skeleton of the work, you will find a plot built on coincidence. Every time. Take, for example The Great Gatsby.
Think of the series of coincidences that have to occur in order to get Gatsby shot at the end of the novel. The same is true for the works of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and your favorite writer. Carefully disguised coincidences drive the key plot points of each of their works.
The same is true in the realm of motion pictures. Think of two crucial events in The Godfather that rely on pure coincidence. The first is when Michael Corleone goes to the hospital to visit his father, arriving just moments after the police guards have been pulled away so that the mob can kill the Don. Imagine if he had arrived fifteen minutes later. The second, also involving Michael, then living in Italy, where the mob plans to kill him by placing explosives in his car. But his young bride, for the first time ever, gets in the car, turns on the ignition, and, as Michael watches in horror from the upstairs window, dies in the explosion. Again, pure coincidence.
One way to avoid your reader’s exasperation at a plot twist based on pure coincidence is to follow the advice of Anton Chekhov, one of our literary giants, who wrote: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the final act it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” It’s the plot device known as foreshadowing. And what it does is help dull the edge on the coincidence. Guns, actual or figurative, are everywhere–in your favorite novels, movies, and TV shows.
For example, if you were a fan of this season’s The White Lotus, each storyline had a gun early on. That gun was an actual gun for Gaitok, the security guard, who sees the handgun in an early episode, loses it, retrieves it, and, in the final episode, uses it to kill another guest. For the Ratliff family, and in particular the younger son Lochlan, the gun is the blender. In earlier episodes, his fitness-obsessed older brother uses it to make protein shakes, which Lochlan declines to share despite his brother’s encouragement. That’s the gun of the first act. And then, in the final episode, his suicidal father blends poisonous seeds into deadly Piña Coladas but decides at the last minute to keep his family from drinking them. Ah, but he fails to rinse out the remaining liquid from the blender–a sight the camera zooms in on. That remnant will nearly kill Lochlan the next morning when, alone in the house, he decides to pour protein powder into that unrinsed blender to make a shake like his older brother had urged on him.
My favorite “gun” is the T. Rex in Jurassic Park. As you may recall, we meet him early on in his paddock where he is being fed with lambs tied to a post. As the movie proceeds, we meet the raptors, those creepy predators that can easily kill anything, including humans. And then, after the storm frees all the dinosaurs, we have the terrifying climatic scene as the raptors move in on the trapped humans from all sides. And then, well, here is that almost ridiculous coincidence, allayed somewhat by Chekhov’s gun. See for yourself here.
So what’s your favorite Chekhov gun?