Often when I am writing, I can hear the voice of a distant and faraway asshole: “That’s way too coincidental.” I know other writers have wrestled with events in their book being too specific and spectacular to have probably happened and knowing that someone would point that out. Yet, we all know that crazy coincidences happen. Most of the time, when you aren’t looking. However, we have entered a state… nay a need, to have all of our entertainment be realistic. So we rail against coincidences when they appear even though they happen often and surround our best real life stories.
For example, I was walking into work a while ago and I have four possible routes into the building. These possible avenues to my cubical are on a spectrum, the closest to my parking spot forces me to walk to my desk mostly indoors and the farthest from my parking spot forces me to walk the most outdoors. From here there are four primary routes, of those four, there are three possible doorways I can enter. Two of the paths lead to one door and both keep me outside the most. Depending on where you park, you can cut through the cars to get to one of the paths or just take a pathway that is the same distance but setup for those parking at the back of the lot – total distance is the same, but one forces you to weave through parked vehicles. Now, I have four choices throughout my walk – watch the sunrise, look at my phone, stare straight ahead at the doorway, or look down. Prior to this day, I received a new prescription and I’ve been dealing with a wonky eyesight where I feel a foot shorter due to my eyes adjusting to my new lenses in my glasses. So, I had been looking down a lot more to help gain experience with the lenses. At the moment I took a glance down, I caught a leather glove blending in with the woodchips. It was the same make, brand, and color of my gloves. So I stopped for a moment, laughed at the fact (literally laughed because I am unaware of what I look like in public), figured the owner would come looking for it and continued walking. Then, I wondered, is that my glove? So I checked my pocket and noticed I only had one glove, the right one. I backpedaled, grabbed the glove, noticed it was the left hand glove, and the same size as my other glove. Then, I had an OJ moment and put the glove on, unlike OJ, it fit. So, in that one walk I found something I hadn’t lost yet. I had lost it, but my perception hadn’t known that it was gone, so, it was a surprise when I came across it. So many things came together in that one moment to let me find a glove I had lost but had not lost – it was Schrodinger’s Glove.
Isn’t that amazing? It is boring but it shows so many things coming together to place me on the path to find the glove. Insane things happen in a similar way, and the people who are involved in those events create a historical progression to make sense of how it came to be – those are coincidences.
What I like about my example is the simple fact that if I asked a series of questions about that event with the glove, most people would answer them opposite of what I have written. They would believe, more than likely, that I noticed the glove, that I chose the path to retrace my path to work, to scour the ground to find the glove, but I didn’t. Instead, I saw a random glove and build the history of losing the glove to make sense of the past.
As with most writers, we run into the situation where we know we are about to make a “statement” or reveal something within the plot that will be considered outlandishly coincidental. Or at least, it is a constant fear that makes us wake up after a heavy day of writing and immediately add in a few sentences or mark what we fear will be used against in a blog post. I am not kidding, I once went to bed only to get out twenty minutes later when I couldn’t sleep because I assumed something I wrote would be labeled to coincidental. Would it actually be? No idea, but there are a few ways I’ve seen writer’s handle it.
The first way, which is invisible to the reader and what I used to do, is correcting the text and adding more information to make sense of the event. Sometimes, this means cutting certain text or building explanations throughout the book (retroactively) that would solve the later issue. This can happen in edits, or can happen during a sleepless night when your contemplating the actual physics of space travel. After three hours of research, you toss in some mumbo jumbo that modern science was wrong about some principle and then offer the real life proof that isn’t yet substantiated. Realistic but horribly boring to actually write and can seemingly take a reader out of illusion of your novel.
The second way I’ve seen, this was first noticed in Vonnegut’s novel Bluebeard, is when the author breaks the forth wall and calls you out. Now, this is much easier if your reader is reading a first person account with a personality in the narration. Instead of offering an explanation as an omnipotent narrator, the narrator just says, “Don’t be an asshole, I know it doesn’t seem realistic but in 400 BC talking to someone on the moon wasn’t realistic either, so just trust me, it happened”. This can also take you out of the illusion of your novel, but in a fun way if your narrator has a personality that would have them do this to their reader.
The third way is the simplest, you say fuck it and don’t care.
For me, I am using both the second and first way of explaining coincidences, but next time you think something is unrealistic, remember that the world is a magical place and not everything in the universe has to be based on the laws of science – especially in fiction. Now, I will let you get back to your zombie novel and how you’re wondering who is currently landscaping all the cities they have visited.