Hope that was clear. Some coincidences make you roll your eyes. Some don’t. What’s your limit? Can you explain which you will accept and which you won’t in your fiction (printed or movies or tv)?
The obvious answer is “one too many” – although it’s not the number of coincidences, so much as the absurdity of them and how they affect the plot.
True story: once upon a time my father was walking to a meeting on Michigan Avenue in Chicago and he literally bumped into his brother. Neither of them lived anywhere near Chicago, and neither knew the other was there.
Might I have accepted it in a story? Possibly. Would I have accepted it if that chance meeting led to them hatching a master plan to take over the world? No.
I know what you’re talking about. I don’t have a definite number, but if Our Hero always manages to get to the station just in time to buy a ticket for the train/plane, and he manages to have enough money to be able to buy whatever he needs to get his job done, and this persists throughout the story, then I’m probably going to give up the story.
Unless it’s something like Moving Pictures, where this is actually part of the plot.
That sort of thing happened to me once. It also happened to two friends of mine who independently went to Prague. Life is weird.
Anyway, genre is important. Farce, almost by definition, requires a long string of coincidences, misunderstandings and comically-timed events far too improbable for real life. On the other hand, that sort of thing happening in a drama without some underlying causality is generally indicative of poor writing.
My parents took a once in a lifetime trip to Scotland. They encountered by chance another couple, who were close friends and cousins by marriage.
It depends heavily on the style of the story. I’m much more forgiving of coincidence in humorous fiction, for instance. Having a canon justification for apparent coincidences in the story can also help.
In Bridge of Birds, for example, Barry Hughart meets both criteria while hanging a lampshade on the whole affair. As his Master Li put it, “If I were to try to count the incredible coincidences of our quest on my fingers, I would wind up with ten badly sprained digits, and I am far too old to believe in coincidences. We are being led toward something…”
I think almost all stories involve coincidence on some level, thematically if not in terms of plot. So it depends entirely on the type of story and the tone of the work But I think over-coincidence-ing is particularly bad when an author wants the audience to believe the hero or heroine is very skilled and they succeed mostly through luck. That completely undercuts the characterization and the story.
Coincidences that create drama are OK. A plot can begin with a chance encounter, for example. Coincidences that resolve drama reek of bad writing. My basic understanding of fiction is that the writer creates characters, and then the world puts them into a situation. The characters (not random chance) then need to resolve the situation, preferably by growing in the process. How they get into the situation doesn’t really matter, so coincidences at the beginning of a story are OK.
To some degree, I think many coincidences function also to keep the number of characters down. Instead of introducing another thief, just use the same one that was introduced in the beginning. While the coincidences might be a bit sketchy, it ends up being far less confusing since too many characters can be bad.
I use a bank in my hometown. Last time I was there I ate lunch in a nearby Dunkies, I bumped into my HS crush, who had just moved back to the area due to hubby’s job.
I think for me the number is around three. One is fine, of course, the reason we’re hearing this story is because this is something interesting that happened to somebody. Two is OK, because that’s just one above - there probably exist people to whom two amazing coincidences happen, and the author has made his characters among that small number.
Three is really stretching it. Unless it’s in there as a joke in a work that doesn’t take itself seriously, or if it’s magical surrealism or something, there’s no excuse for three.
**sachertorte **has an excellent point, but conservation of characters should be able to be accomplished with two big coincidences.
Les Miserables suffers horribly for the coincidences.
That sounds about right. Charles Dickens is notorious for that sort of thing – writing 80% of a great book and then gluing on an ending with a mass of coincidences. Oliver Twist is a perfect example. sachertorte’s comment about keeping the number of characters down definitely applies as well.
The Star Wars prequels are an example of overdoing it. We’re going to see young Darth Vader (i.e. Anakin). Okay. He’s got the force, but is untrained. Okay. But why does he have to build C3PO? Why does one of his buddies just happen to be Greedo? Or at least the same race as Greedo? What possible justification is there for that? Greedo is a friggin’ bounty hunter who goes where the work is, and gets hired by the boss Jabba, who is hanging out on the out of the way Tatooine. There’s no reason to think those aliens are native to Tatooine, and putting one there smacks too much of coincidence. If you want to encounter another one of those, put one on Coruscant, or hanging out with Chewbacca, or something. But not Tatooine.
Whereas the TV show House could use them well. House would be stuck on an unsolvable case with his patient nearly dead, and then a conversation with a different patient over something unrelated would provide a spark of insight that would lead him to the solution to the big case. The reason the coincidences work there even though they help resolve the problem is because the coincidence is a trigger event for the character’s insight or perspective difference that allows him to solve the problem. But he still has to make the connection between a mom not giving her son his asthma medicine and the comatose patient with a brain tumor*, or whatever.
I think the style of work gives parameters for leeway. And I agree, a coincidence that sets up the situation is okay, a coincidence that solves the problem for the hero isn’t.
Or “that is totally implausible. Wait, and then that happens, too? :rolleyes:”
And I had one of those weird coincidences. My uncle from Texas took me to Disneyland in LA, we were standing in line for Magic Mountain when he recognized someone else from his hometown, who was traveling back through from a trip to New Zealand or something.
*I remember the first part, not the big case.
Some of those aren’t coincidences, but I agree they’re annoying examples of oversimplifying that you see in a lot of prequel-type stories. Creating new characters who won’t appear in the main story is a lot of work for little payoff, so the writers set things up in such a way that it turns out everybody has known everybody else for basically their entire lives, which creates continuity problems (like “gee, why did we never hear about this before?” and “why did they act like they didn’t know each other in the first episode?”) and is sort of lazy in general. The Simpsons does it all the time, and while that’s less annoying because it’s a comedy, it still gets monotonous.
So you’ve given up on The Amazing Race ?
Are you Tom Hanks and is she Meg Ryan?
This is pretty much the official answer. Note of course, that Chekov’s Gun is an exception. As are stories that are entirely about the theme of coincidences, fate, or synchronicity.
I remember coming across this rule in something I was reading about screenwriting – probably one of the Wordplay columns, although I can’t recall which one. IIRC the way the author phrased it was that you can have a lot of coincidences in a story…as long as they make things worse for the protagonist. The reader/audience is far more likely to go “Oh come ON!” if the hero escapes danger simply by lucky coincidence than if s/he falls into danger due to a coincidence. A coincidence doesn’t have to be purely bad news for the protagonist, but it should generally be a mixed blessing at best – it brings the protagonist closer to his/her goal, but at the same time creates some new complication.
My big problem with coincidence is something like a mystery novel where a detective gets hired to solve the riddle of the missing pet pig and a couple of days later gets drawn into a web of deceit by the caretaker of a creaky mansion on the hill and then there’s ten murders that went unsolved in 1964 and the sleuth’s father was the lead investigator on the case and OMIGOD THE PIG DUNNIT!
This is only a minor exaggeration.
What everyone else said. My most recent example of an eye-rollingly bad coincidence was in the book Harlequin, by Bernard Cornwell, who is generally an OK author, though I’d never put him in the top tier.
The main character is an English archer, fighting in a war in France. Thanks to the Bad Guy, he ends up accidentally killing another English soldier, and so has to flee and become a fugitive. He decides to take Love Interest and head clear up to the other end of France, where he can hopefully find another army unit to join who won’t know of his horrible capital crime. So that’s what they do, and after many adventures, Hero and LI make it to northern France, where they accidentally bump into…literally every single person they left behind a dozen chapters ago. Right back to fleeing for his life, then, right? Nah. Friendly Nobleman “has a word” with a few of the right people - including Bad Guy who HATES Hero! - and just smooths over that whole “sentenced to death for murdering an innocent squire” thing. Nothing is heard of that situation again.
Now THAT’S a stupid coincidence.