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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/9811
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/9811
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 0