Thriller Guy is in the process of
moving. His home, not this site. Do not fret, he will reappear with some
regularity once the pain of ripping up roots and relocating is
finally finished. In the meantime, TG will steal various interesting posts and
thoughts from other sites and put them up here. This will be somewhat random,
but what is Thriller Guy himself but Somewhat Random?
The following is from LiteraryHub and is brilliant writing advice. TG comes across Coincidence, usually
forehead-slappingly obvious and laughable, in many of the thrillers he reads
and reviews. This sort of crude writing is part of the reason that thriller
writers don’t get no respect in the general literary community. So read this,
no matter what genre you’re working in. TG is going to buy this lady’s book,
because if the rest of it is as smart as this piece is, it’s going to be
invaluable. Yeah, it;s long and requires some thought, but let's show those snooty Literary Writers that we genre folk can learn and apply just as well as they can.
HOW TO WRITE COINCIDENCE THE
RIGHT WAY
FROM E.M. FORSTER TO FLANNERY
O'CONNOR, HOW WRITERS MANIPULATE ALL OF US
One way to use coincidence and
make it work is to have nothing turn on it. Coincidences
feel illegitimate when
they solve problems. If the story doesn’t benefit from the coincidence, it’s
simply pretty and suggestive. Another way to make a coincidence work is to
begin a story with it. Make it the reason there’s a story to tell in the first
place. A third is to establish that the community in which your story takes
place is one in which coincidence is part of the landscape. People in my town,
New Haven, Connecticut, revel in coincidence, and we claim it happens here all
the time: you know everyone in more than one way. Maybe this is true in all
cities of a certain size—small enough that the barista will turn out to be your
office mate’s daughter; large enough that you’ll be surprised.
It also helps to make coincidence
unobtrusive. There’s a wild coincidence in E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards
End that doesn’t seem to bother most readers. Helen Schlegel, one of
the two sisters who are the book’s main characters, for complicated reasons
brings a working-class couple she has befriended to a
wedding reception—and it turns out that the woman she brings was once the
mistress of the bride’s father, Henry Wilcox, whom Helen’s sister, Margaret, is
engaged to marry.
Margaret is the character through
whom we experience all this. The former mistress, Jacky, is drunk, Henry comes
forward to try to get rid of her, and Jacky greets him, “If it isn’t Hen!”
Margaret, who has no idea what Jacky means, apologizes for the awkward
interruption. Henry, recognizing Jacky, imagines that Margaret and Helen have
devised a plot to expose him. He says, “Are you now satisfied?”— which baffles
Margaret even more. Finally, after a painful page, Henry says, “I have the
honor to release you from your engagement,” and Forster says of Margaret,
“Still she could not understand. She knew of life’s seamy side as a theory; she
could not grasp it as a fact. More words from Jacky were necessary—words
unequivocal, undenied.” At that point Margaret begins to speak, stops herself,
and then finally says to Henry, “So that woman has been your mistress?”
None of the characters know
what’s going on, and in the confusion, it’s unlikely that anybody notices that
the author is manipulating all of us, characters and readers. He’s distracted
us by concentrating on Margaret’s psychology. She can’t grasp what has
happened, not because it’s unlikely that the single lower-class person her
sister has befriended should be her fiancé’s former mistress, but because she
doesn’t understand life and sex. The coincidence isn’t important to
Margaret.
Another way to make coincidence
work is to put the story into a slightly unfamiliar universe, as in farce—a
universe where coincidence is part of the joke. Flannery O’Connor’s story “A
Good Man Is Hard to Find” is not farce, but the blatant (though useful to the
story) coincidence in it doesn’t bother readers; I’ve never heard anyone
mention it.
A grandmother scares her family
with tales of an escaped convict, The Misfit. She, her son, and his wife and
children set out on a trip through Georgia, where The Misfit is thought to be
hiding. The family has a car accident, and the person who comes along is The
Misfit, who kills them all. The grandmother is whiny, sneaky, and selfish, and
every bad thing that happens to the family until The Misfit arrives is her
fault. When she breaks out with her son’s name, “Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy,” at
the end, we feel love in the story for the first time.
Why does the coincidence work?
You might think its success had to do with Flannery O’Connor’s religious
universe. Just before The Misfit shoots the grandmother, she looks at him
closely and says, “Why you’re one of my babies.” The grandmother has led this
family into evil, evil that is her opportunity. In a universe with God in
charge of it, even the difficult, opaque God of Flannery O’Connor, a family can
be led, for a reason, down the only dirt road in Georgia where an escaped
convict lurks. But nothing in the story suggests that the coincidence is
connected to its religious message.
One way to make a coincidence
feel less clumsy is to have the author acknowledge that what she is describing
is improbable. But O’Connor doesn’t. There’s no disclaimer, no apology, no
paragraph saying that sometimes the strangest things happen.
Not only does the coincidence
work, but it gives me the same sort of pleasure as coincidences in my life. It
delights me. I think the coincidence is O’Connor’s way of letting us know we’re
in a slightly skewed place in which what happens does not exactly follow the
rules we’re used to.
But the main reason the
coincidence works may be that the characters are so stupid that they don’t know
coincidence is surprising. The grandmother predicts that they will meet The
Misfit, and they do, like people hearing a weather forecast and encountering
rain. The narrative voice is almost always as stupid as they are. Here is the
grandmother in the car.
She said she thought it was going
to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too cold, and she cautioned
Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen
hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after
you before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details
of the scenery.
Only later comes a different kind
of sentence:
There was a pistol shot from the
woods, followed closely by another. Then silence. The old lady’s head jerked
around. She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long
satisfied insuck of breath. “Bailey Boy!” she called.
This narrator would be more than
smart enough to point out that running into The Misfit was highly unlikely, but
this narrator isn’t in evidence at that point in the story. So O’Connor’s
coincidence is something like Forster’s. The characters aren’t aware of
it, or wouldn’t call it a coincidence. There’s so much that the characters
don’t get, in this story, that the unlikeliness of the coincidence is just
something else that’s beyond them. Like Aunt Sarah, who didn’t know that
finding a five-dollar bill was remarkable, they don’t know enough about art to
notice the coincidence; they think they’re just in life. Coincidences happen in
life; they are suspect only in art.
I’ve been arguing for giving your
characters actions to perform, insisting that if fiction only explains how
people feel—what is going on for them inwardly—it doesn’t fully use its
capacity to keep a reader engaged. Making interior experience clear, on the
other hand, by finding equivalents for it in external events, or finding
external events that resonate with feeling, is endlessly interesting, because
we can think up endless numbers of situations that embody the struggles of the
inner life, and many events feel like embodiments of inner dramas. Even in
ordinary life, you know that the day you receive an impossible assignment at
work will be the day you come home to discover that the dishwasher has flooded
the kitchen floor. Isn’t resonance what makes one event worthy of going into a
story and another not worthy? Stories that don’t work sometimes include long,
boring scenes in which people do something like clean a car window. The trouble
is not that nothing is happening but that what happens has no connection to
strong feeling, to the inner life. Unless, of course, it’s a story like Andre
Dubus’s “The Winter Father,” in which a man who doesn’t live with his children
takes them to dinner, then has a conversation with them in his car, outside his
ex‑wife’s house.
Next morning when he got into his
car, the inside of the windshield was iced. He used the small plastic scraper
from his glove compartment. As he scraped the middle and right side, he
realized the grey ice curling and falling from the glass was the frozen breath
of his children.
Consider the morality play, in
which abstract qualities like good and evil take form as characters. In the
fifteenth-century English play Everyman, a man is told by a character
named Death that he must undertake a journey from which he won’t return. All
his ordinary friends (Fellowship, Kindred, and so on) refuse to go with him,
but he is finally accompanied by Knowledge and Good Dedes. We still write books
about journeys because we are interested in inner journeys; we still write
books about conflict because we have taken notice of some inner conflict. Once
we consider action not as the sign of cheap fiction, but as the way any fiction
embodies the life within us, then it’s clear that no single kind of action is
superior to any other kind. Anger and conflict can be expressed by means of a
novel about a war, but also by a novel about a conflict in the workplace or in
a family. There is such a thing as the story or novel in which nothing happens,
but that’s not the same as the story or novel that makes us care intently
whether or not a flower will be picked and then shows us a character
surreptitiously picking the flower.
But what makes us care whether
the flower is picked or not? A beautiful description of the flower won’t do it,
and a pathetic description of the person who doesn’t want it picked won’t do
it. What will make us care is some other action or conflict that is going on at
the same time and coincides with the picking of the flower: that is, some
action that belongs by coincidence. Coincidence, Webster’s Third New
International Dictionary says, means “the concurrence of events or
circumstances appropriate to one another or having significance in relation to
one another but between which there is no apparent causal connection.” That
could mean my roommate meeting the man from the gas company under the crepe
paper streamers, but it could also mean Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce’s Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, breaking his glasses when he is small and
defenseless in a harsh place. Appropriateness, that is, can be the damnedest
thing ever, or it can simply be suggestive and interesting. Coincidence could
mean the concurrence of somebody’s inner sorrow with the privations of the
Great Depression or with the anxiety and frustration of the war in Vietnam,
Iraq, or Afghanistan. It could mean The Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s story
meeting the grandmother, a different kind of misfit. Essentially, coincidence
is the coming together of two events. Of course, these coincidences can be
clumsy and manipulative as well: you’ll need to figure out a way to make your
ordinary eighteenth-century Bostonian part of history without having Paul
Revere’s horse step on his foot.
If, as we make up any story, we
start with one event and ask ourselves what else might be happening, we risk
obvious coincidences and correspondences, but we give ourselves an exciting
opportunity: the chance to bring into our stories events that will make them
not merely plausible but arresting. “What else might be going on in the life of
this character?” is a question that is not hard to answer, and if we are open,
as we write, to the strong feeling in our work, the possibilities that come to
mind will often turn out to enliven our stories and tell us more than we knew
about what’s going on in them.
Coincidence is often what gives
fiction its chance to mean something. When two things come together, improbably
or not, a spark is struck. Making those things happen simultaneously suggests
that meaning is just beyond the surface. Many of us are in rebellion against
meaningfulness. Randomness is cool and anything else is slightly nauseating,
the sort of profound philosophy that can be inscribed on mugs printed with
little rainbows, or posted on Facebook. The risk is that the author is seen
scrambling around making it happen, caring too much about meaning. Coincidence
is risky.
Coincidence is risky, but risk is
good, we all know that. When one of my sons was in a writing program in high
school, he was graded on risk-taking. “Jacob got an A-minus in risk,” I
told anyone who’d listen. Aren’t we looking for guidance in writing that,
unlike the directions provided by rules and formulas, will be unsafe? Of
course, it’s risky—and often admirable—to write openly about true personal
hardship and pain. It’s also risky to make up story. If the dictates of craft
are safe and limiting, the suggestion that we make an event happen, and try to
sense what other event might be going on at the same time, is not just risky;
it’s stimulating. The kite soars; ideas come.
Using coincidence is part of our
opportunity to focus on story, on the way story offers meaning and solace and
delight. There is loveliness in things happening and then happening some
more—and happening simultaneously—whether on a small or a grand scale. Anything
we describe—art or music or sex or a heavy rainstorm—is in the story by report,
but the story, its coinciding strands, is there itself, something beautiful no
matter what’s in it. Writing must always be linear, since we read one word at a
time, but nothing in life happens all by itself. Coincidence brings
simultaneity into your story. Used thoughtfully, it makes the narrative richer
and deeper. Look to the right and left of your characters; see what more they
can do, what they must do, to articulate in action that inner life we
love so much. Like dreams, stories make feeling tangible.
Alice Mattison is a widely
acclaimed author and longtime writing teacher. She has published six
novels—including The Book Borrower, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, and
When We Argued All Night—as well as four collections of short stories and a collection
of poems. Twelve of her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, and other work
has been published in The New York Times, Ploughshares, and Ecotone and
anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best
American Short Stories. A frequent panelist at AWP and other writing
conferences, she has held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She
has taught at Brooklyn College, Yale University, and, for the last twenty-one
years, in the Bennington Writing Seminars, the MFA program at Bennington
College. Her book The Kite and the String, is out now.
