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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26413
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26413
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Life is full of chance occurrences. In many ways, though, our appetite for story is based on our appetite for a more logical, predictable world than we actually live in. We want stories to have the logic that the real world does not.

But chance can be made logical simply by foreshadowing. If a picnic is going to be ruined by rain at a critical moment, the reader does not feel cheated by this chance occurrence if earlier a character observed clouds on the horizon or heard a weather forecast predicting a chance of rain. A gun that jams at the critical juncture does not make the reader feel cheated if previously characters have discussed how this gun jams sometimes or a character is scolded for not cleaning their gun properly.

I once saw Bernard Cornwell speaking at the Historical Novel Society Conference and he talked about going back and putting doors in wall. If we was going to have Sharpe run down an alley and escape the French through the back door of a tavern, he had to go back and have him walk through that door a few chapter's earlier. Without the foreshadowing, it is dumb luck. With the foreshadowing, it is part of the world and therefore legitimate when it comes in handy for escape.

It is obviously possible to take this too far, or to use it too often. And it is obviously unsatisfactory if luck, no matter how foreshadowed, gets the protagonist out of having to face their moment of moral crisis. They have to face it, for that it the heart of the story arc.

But on the other hand, in order to force the protagonist towards that moment, it is often necessary to herd them into a box canyon through a series of accidents, because in real life they would naturally find ways to avoid the climactic moment. Chance, then, is how you bring your protagonist, kicking and screaming, to their moment of truth. And as long as the chance (good or bad) that brings them there is appropriately foreshadowed, the reader will not feel you have cheated.

Original score: 10