Writers are often told that too much coincidence makes for bad storytelling. Here, Ayse Papatya Bucak refutes that notion and offers useful insight into how and why coincidence can work.
Conventional wisdom around plotting is that a story can start with a coincidence but it can’t end with one. A coincidence that generates conflict is great, but a coincidence that solves conflict is going to be viewed as a manipulation of the story on the part of the writer. To which I say: Yes, but also no.
For the sake of this essay, I’m going to define coincidence as any event that would seem statistically unlikely to the average person. I say “average person” because my brother is a statistician and thus I am aware of just how often the average person is incorrect about what is actually statistically likely. But here I want to talk about what the average reader is likely to find unlikely.
But first, why do we find things unlikely? Usually because they have no discernible cause.
Using coincidence in fiction is a way to generate a plot that is not fully dependent on cause and effect. A lot of narrative is generated by the sequence of this happened which caused the next to thing happen and so on. My question is: If this happens and that happens, yet the first thing does not cause the second, can we still make that story work for an average reader?
First let me acknowledge, you might be writing a story in the vein of Flannery O’Connor in which coincidence is not really coincidence—it’s an act of God. Or you might be writing a speculative story in which things that would be a coincidence in our world are normal in your fictional world.
This is the case in Sofia Samatar’s short story “The Moon Fairy,” which begins, “When the Moon Fairy arrived, blown in through an open window one summer night, we were all surprised by how much it resembled Sylvie.” By normalizing one surprise—a moon fairy blew in through the window—the second surprise is rendered less strange because the reader immediately knows we are in a world where unlikely things happen.
In the story, the Moon Fairy and Sylvie quickly become deeply attached. The two enter a mutually obsessive relationship—the Moon Fairy battering herself against Sylvie’s door when it’s shut against her when Sylvie is ill, followed by Sylvie’s refusal to return to college because she would be unable to have the Moon Fairy in her dormitory.
But then one day the Moon Fairy simply flies off, leaving a devastated Sylvie behind.
A reader might wonder about the Moon Fairy’s motivation to leave without explanation. But, according to the book On Human Interactions with Lunar Sprites, a book that has been in Sylvie’s family’s possession for the bulk of the story, this is simply what lunar sprites do.
The statistically unlikely events—the unexpected arrival and equally unexpected departure of the fairy—are made normal by the world of the story, but they are not made insignificant by that normality. The humans in the story can’t stop looking for cause and effect; they can’t stop believing that they have the ability to control their own fate. “‘The most terrible thing,’” one of the case studies in On Human Interactions with Lunar Sprites says, “‘is that I do not know why it came, and I do not know why it left. I spend my days thinking, not only what I might have done to avoid its arrival, but of what I might have done to keep it near me.’” Sylvie, too, is destroyed by the loss of her moon fairy. An extreme reaction made more plausible by the fact that it fits a pattern.
Events that lack causality, in this case, are not just a means of creating plot; they are a means of deepening the story.
For another example, let’s look at Anthony Doerr’s “The Shell Collector,” the titular story of his debut collection. “The Shell Collector” is a realist story told with a fairy tale-ish tone. In the story, a blind naturalist has made a life for himself collecting shells. But one day a woman with malaria is stung by a cone shell, a type of poisonous snail, in the shell his kitchen. The bite which should have killed her instead cures her. Suddenly people flock to the island hoping to be bitten by a cone shell in the hope of being cured of their ailments.
A character being cured by a poisonous snail bite fits my definition of a statistically unlikely event—a coincidence. But Doerr presents this unexpected turn in the story as natural: we are in a world of shells, of course there are twists. He writes, “Two years ago, there was this twist in his life, this spiral that was at once inevitable and unpredictable, like the aperture in a horn shell. (Imagine running a thumb down one, tracing its helix, fingering its flat spiral ribs, encountering its sudden, twisting opening.)” Doerr actually builds a story structure into his story. A structure made all the more believable by how organic it is to the subject matter of the story. In this way, Doerr teaches readers how to accept one of the hard-to-believe moments that this story presents.
But Doerr has also set up a story in which surely more people are going to get bit by this cone shell. When readers see people flocking to this island, all wanting miracle cures, the possibility of more bites is something the average reader will probably anticipate. We’ve entered into more traditional cause and effect here. If a bunch of people are trying to be bitten by a poisonous snail some of them will be.
One of the people seeking a miracle cure is the leader of a local mosque whose eight-year-old daughter is dangerously ill with malaria. The shell collector refuses to help the father find a cone shell to bite his daughter, but the girl’s father says, “Are those…not strange and amazing coincidences? That this American was cured of her afflictions and that my child has similar afflictions? That you are here and I am here, that animals right now crawling in the sand outside your door harbor the cure?”
It’s reasonable for this man to believe that the hand of God is at work. The story doesn’t prove or disprove this idea, but rather it allows it to exist within the story.
After some time, the shell collector looks for the smallest cone shell he can possibly find and allows it to bite the girl. To the reader, this feels like fifty-fifty odds that the girl will be cured or be killed. When the girl is cured, the reader is relieved, and we feel a certain narrative satisfaction. And we believe in the moment because the cone shell has cured one person already.
If you’re a fairy tale reader, you can probably guess that one more bite is coming. And you can guess that whoever is bit won’t survive because stories don’t have the same thing happen three times in a row.
With this pattern of two bites followed by two cures, Doerr creates what I’d call a narrative inevitability, a sense in the reader that even though x does not cause y in the plot, x does make the occurrence of y expected in the story. The girl being saved will not cause a third, this time deadly, bite. but it does make it a narrative inevitability—which satisfies the reader the same way cause and effect do.
When the shell collector’s adult son arrives on the island, readers might intuit that a fate-driven story demands a sacrifice. Readers may also remember the opening of the story, which begins at the end, when two journalists arrive and the reader is told, “They asked nothing about his son.” When the inevitable tragedy occurs, it’s devastating, but Doerr has laid the foundation for it.
A lot of writers want their story ending to be surprising yet inevitable. In this story, Doerr has made the most statistically likely outcome—a character gets bit by a deadly snail and dies—a surprising one. His son’s death is an expected surprise, meaning a surprise the reader should have seen coming.
The final surprise is that this story is not in a three-part structure but a four-part one. In the end, the shell collector himself gets bit, another expected surprise. It is a statistically likely event—the man has been handling poisonous snails regularly—that feels unlikely precisely because he’s been handling poisonous snails regularly and until this moment never been harmed.
Doerr now has the choice of saving or killing the shell collector. In terms of anticipating what the reader expects, it feels a little like a game of rock, paper, scissors, in which Doerr threw rock two turns in a row, and then scissors, and now he has to decide: Go back to rock (let the shell collector live), stick with scissors (let him die), or try paper.
In the end, Doerr has Seema, the girl saved earlier in the story, save the shell collector.
Once again, the reader has the sensation of the surprising but inevitable. The story has brought the narrative full circle, back to the girl. It feels like coincidence, but it’s not really coincidence because, unbeknownst to the reader, Seema has been bringing the shell collector weekly supplies ever since she recovered, and so she is there when he most needs her. A logical act of gratitude, not a coincidence at all.
In the end, if we eliminate coincidences from our fiction, we ignore the reality that narratives are not determined solely by empowered characters who can alter their own fate. Some things simply happen; how humans react to that lack of control is its own story.
by Ayşe Papatya Bucak
Ayşe Papatya Bucak is the author of the collection The Trojan War Museum. Her stories have been selected for the O. Henry, Best American, and Pushcart Prize anthologies and she has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell, and other institutions. She lives in South Florida, where she teaches at Florida Atlantic University.