Without coincidence there is no story

There’s a Chinese expression: without coincidence there is no story. At the same time, in creative writing class, we are told to not put too many coincidences in our story. This is ironic because real life, what our stories are trying to imitate, is nothing but a series of coincidences.

Let me illustrate with a real life example. On Friday after work, I headed over to my parent’s place. They are out of town but fortunately I have the key to their place. When I got to their place, I found that my keys had dropped out of my pocket. I was now without keys to my parent’s place but also my own home and my wife had another hour and a half before she got back from work. I thought there was a small possibility that I had left the keys in my apartment’s door so I rushed back home with a didi (Chinese uber). In the didi, I was able to slightly charge the dying battery in my phone. Alas, there were no keys hanging conveniently in the lock. Not wanting to wait around in front of my apartment door, I decided to go shopping while waiting. I took a share-bike to my local supermarket. While I was there my phone’s battery died, though I managed to get a share-bike for the ride home. As I entered my apartment building, I decided to drop by the security office to ask what time it was as I now had no idea when my wife would be arriving. Leaning through the window of the security office to ask the time, I notice my keys sitting on the security desk. Apparently I had dropped them in the building and someone had turned them in. With joy in my heart, I reclaimed my keys.

Now there’s a lot of coincidences in this story but I’ll only point out a few:

1.       Keys got dropped in my building and not anywhere else on my journey to my parent’s place (like in the metro).

2.       I took a taxi back from my parent’s place instead of the metro. Had I taken the metro it would have take a lot longer to get back and I wouldn’t have gone out shopping.

3.       I decided to go shopping instead of waiting around.

4.       My phone’s battery died leaving me without knowledge of what time it was.

5.       I decide to go to the security office to ask the time.

Had any of these steps not taken place, I probably wouldn’t have gotten my keys back. The fact is that if I put this scene into a story, it would a) be too coincidental for the reader to believe and b) would be pointless unless I was doing a comical story and put in some funny bits which would make the story about the comedy and not about the keys. Let’s say for example, in a story, someone is supposed to meet someone but loses their keys so they cancel the meeting but they find them a little while later. Unless the fact that the meeting got canceled has an effect on the story, the fact that a character lost his keys and found them again makes no difference since he had his keys to start and in the end has them again. Of course you could do a story about the journey to find the keys but then the story is about the journey and not about the keys. Anyway that was just some thoughts I had about coincidences when I lost my keys last Friday.

New WoW expansion launches tomorrow (hype) so that will push writing a bit on the side. Nevertheless I’ve been working on getting my short story ready to send off to magazines and hopefully by September I will be working on my redraft.

Movie of the week: The Meg: It’s been a while since I’ve seen a good underwater action movie and this one did it pretty well despite defying the laws of deep sea diving. The scenes at Sanya were hilarious because it looks exactly like a Chinese beach with not a single person actually swimming. It’s probably not for everyone but I enjoyed it. I have not read the novel series it’s based on so I can’t say if the novel’s story holds together more or not. It’s more like Jurassic Park or Godzilla then Jaws.