How To Use Coincidences In Fiction
5 ways creators can make strange incidents believable by learning from authors like Jane Austen
Once when I was just starting out as a writer, a magazine was a few days late in sending a check, and I wasn’t sure how I’d eat until it arrived. To burn off my frustrations, I went for walk in Carl Schurz Park, near my apartment in Manhattan, and just inside it, I found a wet $10 bill stuck to a bush after a recent cloudburst.
The park usually heaved with people but was nearly empty after the rain. Had I arrived on a sunny day, someone no doubt would have spotted that bill before I did.
Flukey or coincidental events like that can happen to anyone. So can harder-to-believe incidents: near-death experiences, miraculous recoveries from illness, life-changing chance encounters. Any of them can work in fiction if you make them credible to readers.
‘But it really happened that way!’
Like most writing teachers, I’ve at times told students that their description of an incident wasn’t believable, only to hear them protest, “But it really happened that way!” They’ve received a gentle correction.
Whether or not it “really happened” doesn’t matter in fiction. What matters is whether or not…
