On the role of "accidents" in "realistic" stories
Accidents are a part of our real life. It is possible to see an old friend accidentally. It is possible to find a fallen comet accidentally. It is possible to kill someone by an accident, etc. Many stories of our real life are based on an accident. Also many good "realistic" stories begin by occurrence of an accident for the main character. But based on my personal experience in the life I think occurrence of "two" independent accidents in a "single" drama is rare and strange. So it seems if I want to write a realistic story I should avoid occurrence of frequent accidents in it. In the other words it seems that a story which begins with an accident could be reasonably realistic even if this accident is too strange or rare to happen but a story with more than one accident seems unnatural and unrealistic.
Question: Does frequent occurrence of accidents in a single story harm its realistic content? As an example, can we be almost sure that a story which its main character accidentally sees his old friend in the street and also finds a comet in his garden in the same day, is not a story based on the truth? Do these stories produce a sense of being unrealistic for their audiences?
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First, I'd like to clarify your use of "comet". A little googling indicates comets are typically measured at about 8 km = 5 mi. Something like that "landing in someone's back yard" would be a globally catastrophic event. That itself could be a good story, but perhaps you meant a meteorite, a small piece of space debris that survived it's fall to earth.
Second, and more important, within the last (rough guess) decade or two, the idea that our lives meander through a series of arbitrary chance occurrences (could be "accidents") has made it's way into some more mainstream books and movies. The theme is at least as old as existentialism, finding it's modern roots in Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.
But based on my personal experience in the life I think occurrence of "two" independent accidents in a "single" drama is rare and strange. So it seems if I want to write a realistic story I should avoid occurrence of frequent accidents in it. In the other words it seems that a story which begins with an accident could be reasonably realistic even if this accident is too strange or rare to happen but a story with more than one accident seems unnatural and unrealistic.
On the other hand, Roy Sullivan has reportedly been hit by lightning seven times. While I think you're right in general, that a particular genre cannot have too many wild accidents, there are also cases where several accidents combined can create a type of mystery and confusion, such as an innocent man being found guilty of a crime, a guilty person getting away, etc. There's also the genre based on Shakespeare's, "The Comedy of Errors". And finally, realistic accounts of wars include many instances of both tragic and fortunate accidents that in total contributed greatly to the final outcome outside the control man.
So what the heck am I saying? Be original. If you want a lot of accidents, feel free to have them. Just make sure they make sense. One way of having something make sense is to be unapologetic about it - let the reader you know it would normally be absurd to see it this way, but from the perspective of your story (or the perspective a character) it is perfectly logical. Or in other words, ditto on what everyone else says... learn the rules but then feel free to break them in any way you want.
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You can have as many coincidences/accidents as you like, as long as you are able to maintain suspension of disbelief.
You need to spend more time on Tv Tropes where you will find variations on coincidences/accidents such as Contrived Coincidence, Coincidence Magnet, and Theory of Narrative Causality.
If you can suspend disbelief in your audience you can turn Lake Michigan into a hot fudge sundae, at least on the radio.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/9808. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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If you're concerned about too many accidents, then try to find a way to add some purpose to some of them.
1) It's doubtful that you can find a way for a comet to land in someone's garden deliberately if you're not writing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But if you need for A to meet up with old friend B, you could set up some background:
- It's May. A's niece is graduating college. While shopping for a gift/traveling to attend the graduation, A starts thinking about her own college graduation. This makes her think of the friends she had in college. One of them is B. When she gets home, she looks up B on Facebook and sends B a quick message. B responds with an email. They agree to meet for lunch.
- It's Christmas. A is prepping her gift card list. A pulls out an old address book to find Auntie So-and-So's address. B's name is in it. Follow on as above.
- It's spring cleaning time. A is cleaning out her closets and finds mementos from college/a scrapbook/an old sweater etc. Something reminds her of B.
You could of course reverse any of those so that B finds A, although that may feel too much like coincidence (which is similar to accident).
2) Or you could take the opposite tack and have the "accidental" meeting in the street turn out to be very deliberate, but the reader and/or character doesn't discover the machinations until much later in the book.
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