How do you determine if a plot device is too coincidental?
I see lazy plot devices as anything that is too coincidental. Person One just so happened to be in the 'area' when Person Two was attacked (then they end up running into each other a bunch of times afterwards--really?). Those nicks-of-time rescues. Some random thing distracting a villain right before they are victorious and giving the hero enough time to gain the upper hand.
I'd also like to think happenstance/luck/fortune has a place in sustaining tension, such as bad weather preventing the villain from reaching the heroes or certain people's paths so happening to cross at the right time.
How do you draw the line between a plot device that is too contrived and a plot device that propels the story forward without breaking the suspension of disbelief?
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If I think a new event or occurrence might be too unbelievable, I might have my protagonist express and work through the same doubts. Instead of skimming over the incredible coincidence, I would emphasize the luck involved. As long as they are used sparingly, having a perfect plot twist is believable because sometimes life actually happens like that.
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If you feel like your plot elements show too much of the author's deus ex machina, then go back and figure out a way to make them more organic.
Sometimes this may mean backing up several scenes, or possibly halfway back into the book, to put your pieces in motion. If Sherlock needs to run into Molly late at night at the morgue, you have to establish early on in the storyline that Molly keeps long hours and has no life so it's not unusual for her to be at the morgue at 2am, on Christmas Eve, etc. This is less contrived than "Molly happened to forget her purse at the morgue and went back to get it because she needed her phone and just happened to run into Sherlock."
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Several good answers and I don't want to repeat what they said, but let me add:
I think you can almost always get away with ONE coincidence that gets the story rolling. Like suppose the story begins with two people who are fierce business rivals just happening to meet in a social setting and becoming romantically involved, only discovering their identity as business rivals later. (The Shop Around the Corner, You've Got Mail) Is this an unlikely coincidence? Yes. But few readers will question it, because we accept that this is what gets the story started. It's unlikely, but if it didn't happen, if the two never met, there would be no story at all. When we are relating true stories, we don't talk about the 1000 times that someone went to the grocery store or the office or the park and nothing interesting happened and he went home; we talk about the one time that something interesting DID happen that changed his life. Same in fiction.
Ditto Lauren's comments about turning coincidences into probabilities. If you tell us that one day Bob is walking down the street and he just happens to see a gun lying on the sidewalk and he picks it up and sticks it in his pocket, and then he walks into a bank just as it is being robbed and he heroically saves the day, the reader will likely find the coincidence implausible. But if you tell us that Bob has been carrying a gun constantly every day for the last 20 years, it doesn't sound so implausible. Or if you say that Sally has long dreamed of opening her own restaurant but never had the resources to do it, and one day she attends a class on French literature where she meets someone with a similar dream who is looking for a partner, it sounds like an implausible co-incidence. But change it to a class on how to start a business, and it doesn't sound unlikely at all. Etc.
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