Recently, I re-stumbled across one of my favorite Pinterest posts (pardon the bad spelling, etc.):
🤣
This is an excellent example of something past writing teachers have told me:
A coincidence to get your characters into trouble is fine.
A coincidence to get your characters out of trouble is cheating.
Just like the writer of that post, we've all—probably more than once—had the experience of accidentally ticking someone off or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thus, it's relatable when our characters land in hot water (whoops, pun not intended) the same way. But in real life, once we're in trouble, we almost always have to get ourselves out of it. Rarely, if ever, does someone else just happen to show up and save the day.
That concept is often called deus ex machina, which roughly means "god from the machine." The idea comes from ancient plays in which stage machinery would lower the actor playing a god onto the stage. In at least some cases, this god would magically fix whatever mess the other characters had gotten themselves into. Since then, deus ex machina has come to refer to any contrived plot device that easily gets the characters out of trouble.
Interestingly, while authors can often get away with breaking some writing rules, deus ex machina is not one of them. Even Edgar Allan Poe couldn't get away with using it in "The Pit and the Pendulum." Audiences can suspend their disbelief for story elements like magic, humans with superpowers, world-destroying inventions, and all sorts of other fantastical things as long as an author executes them well. But helpful coincidences will ruin that suspension of disbelief faster than Usain Bolt running the 100-meter dash. Audiences gripe about such authorial tactics with comments like these:
"How convenient."
"What? No way."
"Too easy."
"That'd never happen IRL."
"I feel cheated."
So, just as we have to do the right setup for audiences to understand our humor, if we want something to save the day for our characters, we have to foreshadow it earlier in the story. The bigger the coincidence would be, the more setup we have to do. If, say, our protagonist gets hurt while backpacking and we want them to be found by passing hikers, we have to establish that hikers do indeed come through that area. If we want a search-and-rescue (S & R) team to find the protagonist instead, we need to establish at least (a) that there is such a team in the area, (b) that someone can figure out the protagonist is in trouble (e.g., they didn't meet friends for dinner at an agreed-upon time) and alert S & R, and (c) that S & R has the personnel, equipment, and resources to find and rescue the protagonist before it's too late.
Even with sufficient setup, we're not done. We also have to show the protagonist making every effort to solve the problem on their own. For our injured backpacker, we have to show them doing their best to crawl for help, endure the pain, survive the elements, and so on. Only then will the arrival of rescuers feel like a payoff rather than a cheat.
If you're having trouble with this in your story, click here to schedule a time for us to talk about how to make it work.
Write on,
Candice
(Photo: Gage Walker, Unsplash)
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