# Let Coincidence Create Trouble

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 45 · Part 5: Scene and narrative movement

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> Coincidence may begin trouble; it should rarely solve it.

Readers tend to feel a fortunate rescue as cheating even when they can’t say why. Our explanation, which is reasoning rather than a finding, is that a rescue by chance lifts the consequence out of the character’s choices and hands it to the author.

Hardy shows the better use in *Tess of the d’Urbervilles*. Days before her wedding, Tess pushes a letter under the door of Angel Clare’s room, confessing what she has been unable to say aloud. In her haste she thrusts it beneath the edge of the carpet as well as the door. On the morning of the wedding she finds it still there, sealed, unread. Chance has done something, since Angel never saw the letter, but Hardy does not let chance finish the work. She destroys the letter, and the narrator notes that in her conscience she knows the misplaced letter need not have prevented a confession; there was still time. When she tries to speak on the landing, Angel brushes it aside, a second small human choice.

Readers will usually grant one stroke of luck to start things, because something has to start the story and life is full of accidents that do. Once the characters are in trouble, though, readers care how they get out, and chance that rescues them throws that away, while chance that worsens the trouble adds to it.

Dickens resolves *Oliver Twist* through coincidences that solve. The gentleman whose handkerchief Oliver is accused of stealing turns out to own a portrait that Oliver strikingly resembles, and the house Oliver is dragged to burgle shelters a young woman who proves to be his mother’s sister. Mr. Brownlow, explaining to Oliver’s half-brother, says Oliver was “cast in my way by a stronger hand than chance.” The novel converts coincidence into providence, and for readers inside that convention the pattern is the point. A modern reader may refuse it, and a writer who borrows it should do so knowingly.

**Practice.** Find, in half an hour, one fortunate solution in your draft: someone arrives in time, overhears, finds, remembers. Rewrite it so that it is produced by something the character did earlier, by a skill the reader has already seen, or by a price the character pays now. If you cannot, move the coincidence earlier, where it can cause trouble instead of ending it. Then compare the two versions for how much of the scene’s tension survived. If the tension holds, the luck was not carrying the scene and can go; if it drains away, the scene was resting on the rescue and needs a stronger cause.

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