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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47396
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47396
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I would say anything that seems to come out of nowhere is unrealistic fiction, unless the fact that it comes out of nowhere is fairly concealed.

For example, I can make my protagonist's father a college professor, and her mother an MBA business manager, and **because** of that she knows some stuff critical to the plot about both academia and business that the average person would not know.

Now, her knowledge is justified, but in the story, her parent's professions were **not** justified; she was just born with the parents she has. But if I write it correctly and early readers won't care how **convenient** her parent's professions were.

On the flip side, in The Hunger Games (movie), Mrs. Everdeen is in a deep depression, and this is the reason Katniss becomes the stand-in mother and provider for her 12 year old sister, Prim, and it is in this role that Katniss volunteers to take Prim's place in The Hunger Games. The entire plot hinges on Mrs. Everdeen's unexplained and inconvenient depression, or at least Katniss's love for her little sister. (In the book the depression is caused by the death of their father in an inconvenient mining accident.)

In short, I want to say that everything can be traced to some good luck or bad luck in our character's lives, so we don't have to go **too** deep in order to hide that, and make the luck once or twice removed.

If I really **want** a victory to be upended by a dragon my heroes did not expect, it is easy enough to plant the seeds for that as early in the book as I like. At the beginning of the quest, they stole something from the dragon in order to begin their quest. Or they were (randomly) attacked by a juvenile blue dragon, and killed it -- the child of a much larger blue dragon that has been seeking revenge ever since.

Plots demand both successes and failures. Both of those should be justifiable, and the more important the success or failure, the more "layers" of justification should be used to disguise the fact that in the end, it was luck.

The luck of being in the right place at the right time, the luck of being born with the right skill or to the right parents, the luck of searching for the right thing instead of the wrong thing, the luck of random decisions working out. Or the bad luck of any reversals of the above, and perhaps the character's responses to such hardships, which turn the hardships into advantages: Katniss Everdeen, again, becomes an expert huntress and markswoman **because** of her mother's disability and the need to step up and provide for her baby sister; and the inconvenient illness of her mother conveniently gives Katniss exactly the expert skill she needs to survive the Games. (Not to mention it is very convenient that the one enemy killed by Tracker Jacker wasps is the one with the bow and arrows, something entirely unplanned by Katniss).

Original score: 13