Our friend Greybeard sent me a link to a comic today, and I thought it was pretty funny. I’d post it here, but I’m not certain about copyright fair use, so I’ll just link to it and you can look for yourself.

It’s about “contrived coincidences” in story plots.

This, friends, is a very bad thing.

You read a story, and you’re following along with it, and suddenly something happens out of the blue, completely out of left field, purely so that the author can make the plot go in a direction he wants.

C. S. Lewis wrote about a similar issue, somewhere (I forget where, and I don’t have time to riffle through my library). In writing about miracles, he notes that it’s entirely against the rules for a novelist to include a miracle in a story, just to get his hero out of a tight place.

But, he notes, there is at least one legitimate use for a miracle in a story. You can start the story with a miracle. The occurrence of a miracle, followed by an examination of the way it affects the people who observe it, is a perfectly legitimate premise for a story.

In other words, a miracle can pose a problem in a story. But it can’t solve one.

Otherwise, you’ve wasted your reader’s time. You’ve dragged him through all the sturm und drang of plot development, rising action, rising tension, repeated frustrated attempts at resolution, and then you resolve the whole mess with a deus ex machina (a Latin term referring to a dramatist’s trick of sending an actor, dressed like a god, down by block and tackle to save somebody from a bad situation). The whole purpose of a story is to teach the main character something through suffering, and to teach the reader by proxy. The miraculous/coincidental resolution renders the whole exercise meaningless. The story itself becomes a redundant appendage to the climax. You might as well have written the climax on its own, and saved the reader the time.

I note that I have confused coincidence with deus ex machina in this post, but they’re closely related and undeserving of individual attention.