Extravagant incidents

When searching for story or plot ideas, novice novelists will often come across an interesting, fascinating, and quirky incident that they are absolutely sure will make a great novel. Perhaps it was a newspaper article or an anecdote told by a friend.

The reason the idea is so compelling is because it involves a fascinating twist of fate. Coincidence, so to speak. And here lies a trap, a trap that beginning fiction writers often fall prey to.

Just a little seed

First of all, keep in mind that when you are holding onto an idea to use as the basis for your plot, that idea should be just a small one. seed. This is your starting point. This little spark is the only thing in the plot that should come from outside the writer. Everything else about the story will be filtered and shaped by your own unique imagination and frame of reference.

In the years when I was teaching for a writers’ correspondence school (over 9 years, to be exact) I was able to detect when one of my students had created a plot out of a real fluke. First of all, the plot was weak, woefully weak. When I brought up the subject, the response was invariably, “But this is how it really happened.”

Well, well and well! Sorry to disappoint you, but the fact that you tell something exactly how it happens is no A plot!

The plot evolves from Deep Emotion

True, genuine plots arise from the deep emotions of the writer. That rarely happens when a story is built from an outside source. It gets flat and uneventful, and it rarely grabs the reader.

And that brings me to the problem of using coincidence to bring your character to a certain point in the story. Again, it is often the peculiar and coincidental aspect of an incident that catches our attention and arouses our curiosity. While these kinds of things are fun and captivating in real life, in fiction it will always be seen as manipulation by the author.

Why?

Because a plot that is based on destiny is a thin plot. It is the “easy way out”. It is the cavalry that comes over the hill at the very moment when the battle is almost lost. Okay, sure, sure. Your reader is rolling her eyes. You may continue reading, but trust and respect for the author has been lost, or at least slightly diminished.

Avoiding melodrama

The best way to lose the interest of most readers is to ask them to believe something that is not really credible. And that’s the point about an outlandish, wild, out-of-the-ordinary coincidence or a strange fluke. In real life, its main attraction is that something amazing it really happened. This is not what your reader is looking for.

Any incident that has an “operatic” quality, or that comes from far away in left field, is sure to turn into melodrama. It is not the mark of a skilled novelist.

Relying on coincidence is the lazy way to write. It’s a shortcut that means less actual plot work – weaving the story together to make it work. Or put another way, to make the story stand on its own. When it does, it is credible. The reader is ready to “suspend disbelief” and enter his world and accept his story. And in the process, accept you (the author) as well.

And that, my struggling novelist, is what we are all struggling with in this strange business!