CHAPTER 4

Let Happenings Happen

Make Trouble

I was recently waiting in the checkout line at the Italian market in my neighborhood, where a recording of Luciano Pavarotti sings at you while you’re choosing vegetables, and conversation is often in Italian, when a man behind me asked the cashier, “Did you go to the christening party?”

“Yes.”

“Was there any drama?”

“No.”

“I guess that’s . . . good,” he said.

Maybe it was good for the christening party (maybe not), but it’s not so good for the story of the christening party if there was no drama.

Sometimes, in fiction by new writers, nothing happens for reasons that don’t have to do with the effort of thinking up events. I’ve realized that many writers—even if their work is not autobiographical—don’t want to write about events, or even believe they shouldn’t. Although the kite is starting to fly, the restraining string in this instance isn’t common sense, but something more like panic, which pulls the kite down to the ground.

Much in the writing business, as we’ve noticed, requires a certain amount of nerve, if not outright courage: it isn’t enough to sit down at the computer, confront the blank page, and type words, though heaven knows that can be hard enough. Having the will to use what a writer has learned may be harder than learning it, harder than making the decision to write in the first place. For some people, it feels safer and more pleasant to write stories in which nothing happens, or nothing but feeling—people feeling bad, feeling slightly better, feeling slightly worse.

Without trouble, though, there’s no story. There must be drama at the christening party. Little Red Riding Hood must meet the wolf. I know people who are tempted to make the story be about Little Red’s mixed feelings about her grandmother, who fails to understand her granddaughter and has terrible politics. In life, the granddaughter’s feelings are interesting enough—and maybe one unforgettable day she will blurt them out. But if a story is to be worth reading by someone other than Little Red herself, the burst of feeling probably should be embodied in an action that might change things, even if ultimately it doesn’t. The wolf makes anger and hatred tangible. We need the capacity of the wolf to do something large—to eat Grandmother—whether this is the version of the story in which that’s exactly what happens or the version in which Grandmother is saved. That is: you don’t necessarily need life-changing action—but you need, at least, the plausible threat of life-changing action that’s then prevented.

Why do writers avoid that? Sometimes for the reasons I had, back when I was learning to write: I liked fiction’s capacity to depict thought and feeling so much that I figured the more thought and feeling, the better, and why bother with anything else? I confused the question of what makes an interesting moment in a narrative with what makes it a story. Similarly, students I’ve taught sometimes want more than anything else to write about passivity—about people who can’t take action—and so the authors emphatically want nothing to happen in their stories. You can write good stories about anyone you care to write about, though I confess to a certain sinking of the heart when my new student tells me that passive people are those she likes to write about most. And of course the category of passive people includes the interesting subcategory of passive women obsessed with bad men—many volumes of fiction are all about them. If this kind of subject matter attracts you, it may be worthwhile to reread some of your favorite authors carefully, noting what makes the story move along, whether the character moves or not. There must be something—action by someone else, or maybe what are sometimes called acts of God: storms, floods, fires—that starts up suspense in the reader, that makes us wonder what will happen. Or there’s action that might take place and doesn’t. Just as the delight of the inner life rarely provides entire stories, similarly, the miseries of passivity don’t make entire stories either. Don’t confuse the nature of the characters with the structure that tells us about them.

Another reason for resisting action, I suspect, is that some people (surely not you) believe that inventing and writing about bad things makes them likelier to happen. If anyone you know has this problem, it will help if that person creates characters who are distinctly fictional, and are not based on the writer or the writer’s family and friends. I too wouldn’t want to make a character get hurt, robbed, betrayed, abandoned, or cheated—or to make that character hurt, rob, betray, abandon, or cheat others—if I was picturing my sister. And I don’t think my friends and family would appreciate recognizing themselves in a story in which they then die of cancer or rob somebody at gunpoint. So this is yet another reason to invent rather than basing fiction on life.

Making up bad events doesn’t cause them to happen—but it can recall them to mind. If the piece is memoir, or—assuming it’s fiction—if the bad event is based on something in the writer’s life, some lapse in the writer, some loss, some terrible experience, it takes nerve to endure the pain of reliving it. Even if a story is entirely invented, the characters’ emotions will inevitably be ones the writer has felt. It’s understandable that you’d rather not put yourself through fear or jealousy or anger again—but maybe your story requires that you do so whether you like doing it or not.

Furthermore, it’s hard to inflict pain on one’s characters, even if they are imaginary. A shrewd student, after noting all the obstacles faced by the main character in an elaborately plotted novel she read, commented that fiction writers need “sadistic ingenuity.” It takes a certain pleasure in inflicting pain to put a fictional character through enough trouble for a story, let alone a novel. Most of us don’t like being sadistic, even toward imaginary people. I don’t mind giving my characters obstacles and problems, but the first time I killed somebody, though he was old, imaginary, and dead of natural causes, I burst into tears.

A writer I worked with recently kept sending me drafts—which were good to start with and better each time I saw them—of the opening chapters of a novel about a woman trying to get her life going after a bad stretch. Every draft, in more or less detail, included the same episode from when the character was a teenager: on a whim, she committed a series of minor but interestingly subversive acts of vandalism. Suddenly, maybe the fourth time I read this material (which the writer kept reorganizing), the girl committed her crime only once. Someone else caused the rest of the trouble.

I knew this character well and had watched her emerge through drafts that revealed her more and more clearly and meaningfully. When her mischief-making nearly disappeared, I felt cheated, as if I’d gone to a performance of Hamlet in which the prince only nicked Polonius through the arras.

It was instructive to learn why my student had changed the story. She admitted that she liked her character—so she was “coddling” her. The more she had thought about what she’d written, the clearer it became that committing this crime would make a difference in the girl’s life. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to go to college. My student (who quickly saw the flaw in her thinking; I’m telling you this not because this student is incompetent but because she’s first-rate, and if she fell into this error, anyone might) hadn’t wanted to put her character through something so bad.

Characters aren’t interesting and fully real until they do wrong and have problems. Think how boring it is to hear, “And my nephew got into a top law school and met a wonderful girl. . . .” It’s in our bad behavior and misfortune that we become worth hearing about, alas. The reader will like my student’s character more, not less, when she does something naughty, daring, and zany. We shouldn’t shelter our characters and prevent them from living full lives, surely, any more than we want to deprive our children of experience, though we feel even worse when kids we love suffer.

It’s not enough to give characters trouble. As my student foresaw, if she told the story realistically, her girl’s bad behavior would lead to unpleasant consequences. In life it’s usually good to solve problems quickly. If you and a friend have a misunderstanding, the sooner you clear it up, the better. But numerous stories, novels, and films depend for subject matter on misunderstandings that don’t just persist, but worsen. In life, accidents should be avoided, and when they happen, it’s best to act quickly and prevent further mishaps. But in a story, trouble is good and complications are even better—as long as they exist not just to make things upsetting but to give characters a chance to make mistakes or solve problems, bring out latent desires and fears and needs, precipitate the next event. In a story, if a jar of honey shatters on the floor just as the baby crawls in that direction, you need to stifle your impulse to snatch up the baby. We don’t want the baby to cut her fingers just so we can hurt the poor baby—I’m not advocating sadism for its own sake. But if the baby’s injury causes her parents to fire the apparently neglectful babysitter, leading to strain in their marriage as they try to manage without her, or causing the sitter—now jobless—to let her former boyfriend persuade her to become a drug courier after all, then maybe the doorbell must ring as the jar falls, so the babysitter, distracted, doesn’t grab the baby. Resist the temptation to solve your characters’ problems for them. On the contrary, when a problem comes up, think what more you can do with it. Problems lead to story.

Don’t Be Melodramatic—but Be Dramatic

Here’s another reason my students don’t want the baby to get cut on the broken glass: it will be “melodramatic.” I can’t count the number of times students have told me they considered having some much-needed significant event occur in their fiction, but didn’t, to avoid being melodramatic. “Melodrama,” as the word itself suggests, originally referred to a play with music, or to a section of a play or opera in which a character spoke while music played. Our current sense of melodrama as something to avoid originates with Victorian melodramas—popular plays with exaggerated, one-dimensional characters (villains, heroes, distressed young women) and dreadful catastrophes conveniently averted. Silent films, with their great capacity to show action and exaggerated personality traits, and their lack of subtle conversation, made perfect melodramatic crowd-pleasers.

The difference between melodrama and serious drama or film is not in the nature of the events; it’s in the quantity and plausibility of the events, and in the language. After I assigned King Lear to a class I once taught of adults returning to school, a student burst out, “This is a soap opera!” King Lear is different from a soap opera in that most of the characters have ambivalence, complex awareness, and the capacity to change. The language depicts what’s going on in ways that speak to universal experience. While the story has plenty of action, there’s not so much event that it becomes silly. But, yes, the terrible troubles in King Lear might happen in a soap opera. The play greatly moved my nearly illiterate aunt Sarah—who’d been raised on melodramatic Yiddish theater—when the ladies from the senior center went to see Morris Carnovsky, also raised on Yiddish theater, play the king.

Melodrama is exaggerated drama, not simply drama. Don’t be melodramatic, but be dramatic, and if you find that what you’ve written is sentimental, unlikely, or exaggerated beyond plausibility, you can probably fix it by fixing the language you use to tell it. The action itself, if it seems right in your imagination and can plausibly happen in the circumstances you’ve described, won’t feel melodramatic. If it does, take another look at those circumstances. Have you established earlier that the person who performs the action has it in her to do something like this? Are you describing correctly the objects used in this action? What sort of paperweight could cause an injury like that, and when did the person who threw it pick it up, and how come we didn’t know until now that there was a desk in the room, much less a paperweight on it? If there’s a gun, what kind? If there’s a car, what kind of car, and what’s the stretch of road like where the accident happened? Have you added pounding hearts or roiling stomachs to convince your reader that it would be upsetting if a red Ford pickup knocked a white-haired man in a tan Windbreaker off his old Raleigh bicycle, or are you trusting to understatement, letting the facts do the work? If your description of the event isn’t effective yet, add a couple more facts, not a description of the onlooker’s feelings.

Nearly all the writers I meet—I suspect nearly all the writers reading this book—are trying to write literary fiction, which I would define as any fiction that keeps the reader engaged by depicting complex, believable people with complex, believable problems. That is, the reader does not keep reading primarily because the book includes violence, sex, and terrifying possibilities. But that doesn’t mean that literary fiction doesn’t include violence, sex, and terrifying possibilities.

Many years ago a student of mine sat down for a conference and began to cry. When she could speak, she said, “Elizabeth says my work is—commercial!” Elizabeth, her classmate, knew how to get to people. I doubt that nowadays—when marketing departments at publishing houses have plenty to say about any book, no matter how literary—a similar remark would do much harm. Even at the time I refrained from saying what I was thinking, which was “In your dreams!”

A fear of being commercial, however, still seems to grip many new writers, even while they fantasize about writing best sellers. When I complained to a friend that my students weren’t making anything happen in their stories, she said maybe they were avoiding material that her mother would call “common.” It’s true that action links great fiction to schlocky fiction, King Lear to the Yiddish theater. Also, writing about action invariably involves the unglamorous physical world. To imagine the results of your character’s actions, you must think in practical ways, not literary ones. How long is a flight from Dallas to Boston? What are the symptoms of poison ivy? How do you cook cream sauce? (Don’t say it’s simmering, as a poet I once heard did in a poem. The mistake made everything he said seem unreliable, because if you can cook, you know it would curdle.) You must learn unromantic, unliterary facts. If you don’t want your fiction to be cheap and hackneyed, don’t use the facts and literary devices you employ in a cheap and hackneyed way.

Let drama happen—but that need not mean hideous catastrophes. A student I worked with recently had been told “nothing happens in your novel” again and again. I can all but hear him muttering, “All right, all right!” through clenched teeth. Into his beautifully sensitive book he inserted an accidental death and a fire that destroyed everything. The events were so terrible that, with his great psychological insight, he accurately depicted the characters as stunned, helpless in the face of them. I found myself asking him to come up with slightly less catastrophic catastrophes: events that would force people to react, not events so huge that life as the characters knew it more or less ceased. Disaster can be an interesting start for a book: a catastrophe occurs in the first chapter; now what? But hideous catastrophes two hundred pages into a story destroy what came before. Who cares if the marriage was going to survive, now that the wife is dead? What does it matter how the children responded to their father’s neglect, now that the family is homeless and all its possessions have burned up? Look for trouble that will bring out the best or the worst in your people, not simply finish them off.

Don’t (Necessarily) Be Afraid of Coincidence

Let’s think for a bit about coincidence. Coincidence in life, one should note first, is delectable. For instance: my aunt Sarah (the one who liked King Lear) made weekly outings to the department stores in downtown Brooklyn. Once, she told my mother and me a long story about what she had bought and returned that week, mentioning that she ran out of money and lacked bus fare home. Then she stopped. “But how did you get home?” my practical mother asked. Aunt Sarah said matter-of-factly, “I found a five-dollar bill on the sidewalk.” To her, the coincidence wasn’t worth mentioning.

Another example: My two best friends in college and I had grown up in widely separated parts of New York, but one dark night in a lonely downtown Manhattan neighborhood, we discovered that, in different ways, we’d all met a girl there was no reason any of us should know. And a third: When my graduate school roommate passed her doctoral orals, I celebrated by festooning our apartment with crepe paper streamers, which sagged down to the floor before she came home. While I waited for her, the doorbell rang, and there stood a worker from the gas company, who insisted on ducking under the streamers to make an adjustment to our stove that the state required every seven years. He was just emerging from under the streamers near the door when my roommate finally arrived (just as I’d been called to the phone in the hall) and flung open the door to face a man holding a wrench and rising to meet her.

A good coincidence makes me feel as if I’ve stepped through a barrier into another place, sometimes forbidden, sometimes zany. Aunt Sarah’s coincidence, finding five dollars when she was broke, pleases me because of what her nonchalance says about her—apparently she assumed she’d find the money—and because it suggests, lightheartedly, a caring universe. When one of my college friends happened to mention someone we unknowingly had in common in the impersonal city, it was as if we’d strayed into a parallel existence with rules different from ours. Maybe we were already dead. The experience had the quality Freud called uncanny, describing events we fear because they seem to confirm primitive religious notions that civilized people have repressed.

My roommate meeting the man from the gas company was funny, but something more. Something else about my roommate and me: later in life I married a man, and her lifelong partner was a woman. This was decades ago, before gay liberation, and she had sometimes wondered nervously if she might be a lesbian; I hadn’t had the courage to pose the question about myself, but in retrospect I know we were attracted to each other. She was uncomfortable in the presence of many men, and that year I had a boyfriend. I was clueless and clumsy, and she was often angry with me, while I thought the problem was hers.

Though the convergence of the crepe paper streamers, the man from the gas company, and my roommate still pleases me simply because it was so unlikely, I am struck now at how the sudden appearance of a man with a wrench might have felt to her—perhaps emblematic of the distress I’d been causing her all year. Two things happened to happen, my roommate’s doctoral orals and the arrival of the man (calmly announcing his once-every-seven-years mission like a creature in a fairy tale), and the two things belonged—for serious as well as comic reasons—in the same story.

All this seems valuable for fiction, doesn’t it?—all this strangeness and unpredictability. Yet we know that coincidence in fiction, alas, is different. Literature is full of coincidence: everyone connected with the crisis appears at the same place at once; unremarked strangers turn out to be long-lost relatives; unimportant visitors happen to know the secret. Coincidence in fiction makes us feel not that the universe of the story is interestingly unpredictable, but that it’s excessively controlled, heavy, and obvious. In real life we don’t expect coincidence and are excited by it because it’s unlikely but true. If I invent Aunt Sarah and the five dollars, the thrill disappears.

At the end of Dickens’s Great Expectations, the main character, Pip, by chance meets Estella, the arrogant woman he has loved all his life, at the site of a romantically ruined house at moonrise. Estella tells Pip she was wrong not to care about him, and Pip tells us, “The evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.” End of book. Dickens had originally written the ending differently, making Pip and Estella spot each other on a city street in circumstances that couldn’t lead to anything. Though the revised ending he used (he yielded to pressure) leaves the happy future a bit uncertain, this is the kind of coincidence that gives coincidence a bad name. We can enjoy some coincidences in nineteenth-century fiction only if we bring a set of critical standards to our reading that is unlike those we apply to serious contemporary literature. In my mind and maybe yours, an ending that depends on wild coincidence cheapens a book and makes it silly.

I wonder how Dickens and others got away with it. Maybe his readers expected the plots of novels to be improbable. Maybe they accepted the coincidences for spiritual reasons: if Providence makes a coincidence happen, it’s not a lazy device but a thematic statement. Maybe they were better at suspending disbelief than we are, or maybe they were more naïve. I occasionally meet people who don’t quite understand that fiction is invented. If you kept forgetting that Great Expectations is fiction—if your sense of the difference between fiction and nonfiction was blurry—would you have the same spooky thrill about the final coincidence that you’d have if it happened in real life to a friend of yours? Did Dickens’s first readers come upon that passage not just with tolerance and pleased habituation to the form, but with delight?

If you put a coincidence like the one Dickens used into a story you write, you know it will seem amateurish. I rarely see coincidences in student stories. The clumsy use of coincidence (like the melodramatic use of exciting action) has scared some writers away from coincidence altogether. It’s a loss. Don’t we want to put into fiction something like Aunt Sarah matter-of-factly refusing to be surprised, or my roommate encountering an absurd situation that resonated with something serious in her life? How?

One way to use coincidence and make it work is to have nothing turn on it. Coincidences feel illegitimate when they solve problems. If the story doesn’t benefit from the coincidence, it’s simply pretty and suggestive. Another way to make a coincidence work is to begin a story with it. Make it the reason there’s a story to tell in the first place. A third is to establish that the community in which your story takes place is one in which coincidence is part of the landscape. People in my town, New Haven, Connecticut, revel in coincidence, and we claim it happens here all the time: you know everyone in more than one way. Maybe this is true in all cities of a certain size—small enough that the barista will turn out to be your office mate’s daughter; large enough that you’ll be surprised.

It also helps to make coincidence unobtrusive. There’s a wild coincidence in E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End that doesn’t seem to bother most readers. Helen Schlegel, one of the two sisters who are the book’s main characters, for complicated reasons brings a working-class couple she has befriended to a wedding reception—and it turns out that the woman she brings was once the mistress of the bride’s father, Henry Wilcox, whom Helen’s sister, Margaret, is engaged to marry.

Margaret is the character through whom we experience all this. The former mistress, Jacky, is drunk, Henry comes forward to try to get rid of her, and Jacky greets him, “If it isn’t Hen!” Margaret, who has no idea what Jacky means, apologizes for the awkward interruption. Henry, recognizing Jacky, imagines that Margaret and Helen have devised a plot to expose him. He says, “Are you now satisfied?”—which baffles Margaret even more. Finally, after a painful page, Henry says, “I have the honor to release you from your engagement,” and Forster says of Margaret, “Still she could not understand. She knew of life’s seamy side as a theory; she could not grasp it as a fact. More words from Jacky were necessary—words unequivocal, undenied.” At that point Margaret begins to speak, stops herself, and then finally says to Henry, “So that woman has been your mistress?”

None of the characters know what’s going on, and in the confusion, it’s unlikely that anybody notices that the author is manipulating all of us, characters and readers. He’s distracted us by concentrating on Margaret’s psychology. She can’t grasp what has happened, not because it’s unlikely that the single lower-class person her sister has befriended should be her fiancé’s former mistress, but because she doesn’t understand life and sex. The coincidence isn’t important to Margaret.

Another way to make coincidence work is to put the story into a slightly unfamiliar universe, as in farce—a universe where coincidence is part of the joke. Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is not farce, but the blatant (though useful to the story) coincidence in it doesn’t bother readers; I’ve never heard anyone mention it.

A grandmother scares her family with tales of an escaped convict, The Misfit. She, her son, and his wife and children set out on a trip through Georgia, where The Misfit is thought to be hiding. The family has a car accident, and the person who comes along is The Misfit, who kills them all. The grandmother is whiny, sneaky, and selfish, and every bad thing that happens to the family until The Misfit arrives is her fault. When she breaks out with her son’s name, “Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy,” at the end, we feel love in the story for the first time.

Why does the coincidence work? You might think its success had to do with Flannery O’Connor’s religious universe. Just before The Misfit shoots the grandmother, she looks at him closely and says, “Why you’re one of my babies.” The grandmother has led this family into evil, evil that is her opportunity. In a universe with God in charge of it, even the difficult, opaque God of Flannery O’Connor, a family can be led, for a reason, down the only dirt road in Georgia where an escaped convict lurks. But nothing in the story suggests that the coincidence is connected to its religious message.

One way to make a coincidence feel less clumsy is to have the author acknowledge that what she is describing is improbable. But O’Connor doesn’t. There’s no disclaimer, no apology, no paragraph saying that sometimes the strangest things happen.

Not only does the coincidence work, but it gives me the same sort of pleasure as coincidences in my life. It delights me. I think the coincidence is O’Connor’s way of letting us know we’re in a slightly skewed place in which what happens does not exactly follow the rules we’re used to.

But the main reason the coincidence works may be that the characters are so stupid that they don’t know coincidence is surprising. The grandmother predicts that they will meet The Misfit, and they do, like people hearing a weather forecast and encountering rain. The narrative voice is almost always as stupid as they are. Here is the grandmother in the car.

She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too cold, and she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of the scenery.

Only later comes a different kind of sentence:

There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by another. Then silence. The old lady’s head jerked around. She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long satisfied insuck of breath. “Bailey Boy!” she called.

This narrator would be more than smart enough to point out that running into The Misfit was highly unlikely, but this narrator isn’t in evidence at that point in the story. So O’Connor’s coincidence is something like Forster’s. The characters aren’t aware of it, or wouldn’t call it a coincidence. There’s so much that the characters don’t get, in this story, that the unlikeliness of the coincidence is just something else that’s beyond them. Like Aunt Sarah, who didn’t know that finding a five-dollar bill was remarkable, they don’t know enough about art to notice the coincidence; they think they’re just in life. Coincidences happen in life; they are suspect only in art.

I’ve been arguing for giving your characters actions to perform, insisting that if fiction only explains how people feel—what is going on for them inwardly—it doesn’t fully use its capacity to keep a reader engaged. Making interior experience clear, on the other hand, by finding equivalents for it in external events, or finding external events that resonate with feeling, is endlessly interesting, because we can think up endless numbers of situations that embody the struggles of the inner life, and many events feel like embodiments of inner dramas. Even in ordinary life, you know that the day you receive an impossible assignment at work will be the day you come home to discover that the dishwasher has flooded the kitchen floor. Isn’t resonance what makes one event worthy of going into a story and another not worthy? Stories that don’t work sometimes include long, boring scenes in which people do something like clean a car window. The trouble is not that nothing is happening but that what happens has no connection to strong feeling, to the inner life. Unless, of course, it’s a story like Andre Dubus’s “The Winter Father,” in which a man who doesn’t live with his children takes them to dinner, then has a conversation with them in his car, outside his ex-wife’s house.

Next morning when he got into his car, the inside of the windshield was iced. He used the small plastic scraper from his glove compartment. As he scraped the middle and right side, he realized the grey ice curling and falling from the glass was the frozen breath of his children.

Consider the morality play, in which abstract qualities like good and evil take form as characters. In the fifteenth-century English play Everyman, a man is told by a character named Death that he must undertake a journey from which he won’t return. All his ordinary friends (Fellowship, Kindred, and so on) refuse to go with him, but he is finally accompanied by Knowledge and Good Dedes. We still write books about journeys because we are interested in inner journeys; we still write books about conflict because we have taken notice of some inner conflict. Once we consider action not as the sign of cheap fiction, but as the way any fiction embodies the life within us, then it’s clear that no single kind of action is superior to any other kind. Anger and conflict can be expressed by means of a novel about a war, but also by a novel about a conflict in the workplace or in a family. There is such a thing as the story or novel in which nothing happens, but that’s not the same as the story or novel that makes us care intently whether or not a flower will be picked and then shows us a character surreptitiously picking the flower.

But what makes us care whether the flower is picked or not? A beautiful description of the flower won’t do it, and a pathetic description of the person who doesn’t want it picked won’t do it. What will make us care is some other action or conflict that is going on at the same time and coincides with the picking of the flower: that is, some action that belongs by coincidence. Coincidence, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary says, means “the concurrence of events or circumstances appropriate to one another or having significance in relation to one another but between which there is no apparent causal connection.” That could mean my roommate meeting the man from the gas company under the crepe paper streamers, but it could also mean Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, breaking his glasses when he is small and defenseless in a harsh place. Appropriateness, that is, can be the damnedest thing ever, or it can simply be suggestive and interesting. Coincidence could mean the concurrence of somebody’s inner sorrow with the privations of the Great Depression or with the anxiety and frustration of the war in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. It could mean The Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s story meeting the grandmother, a different kind of misfit. Essentially, coincidence is the coming together of two events. Of course, these coincidences can be clumsy and manipulative as well: you’ll need to figure out a way to make your ordinary eighteenth-century Bostonian part of history without having Paul Revere’s horse step on his foot.

If, as we make up any story, we start with one event and ask ourselves what else might be happening, we risk obvious coincidences and correspondences, but we give ourselves an exciting opportunity: the chance to bring into our stories events that will make them not merely plausible but arresting. “What else might be going on in the life of this character?” is a question that is not hard to answer, and if we are open, as we write, to the strong feeling in our work, the possibilities that come to mind will often turn out to enliven our stories and tell us more than we knew about what’s going on in them.

Coincidence is often what gives fiction its chance to mean something. When two things come together, improbably or not, a spark is struck. Making those things happen simultaneously suggests that meaning is just beyond the surface. Many of us are in rebellion against meaningfulness. Randomness is cool and anything else is slightly nauseating, the sort of profound philosophy that can be inscribed on mugs printed with little rainbows, or posted on Facebook. The risk is that the author is seen scrambling around making it happen, caring too much about meaning. Coincidence is risky.

Coincidence is risky, but risk is good, we all know that. When one of my sons was in a writing program in high school, he was graded on risk-taking. “Jacob got an A-minus in risk,” I told anyone who’d listen. Aren’t we looking for guidance in writing that, unlike the directions provided by rules and formulas, will be unsafe? Of course, it’s risky—and often admirable—to write openly about true personal hardship and pain. It’s also risky to make up story. If the dictates of craft are safe and limiting, the suggestion that we make an event happen, and try to sense what other event might be going on at the same time, is not just risky; it’s stimulating. The kite soars; ideas come.

Using coincidence is part of our opportunity to focus on story, on the way story offers meaning and solace and delight. There is loveliness in things happening and then happening some more—and happening simultaneously—whether on a small or a grand scale. Anything we describe—art or music or sex or a heavy rainstorm—is in the story by report, but the story, its coinciding strands, is there itself, something beautiful no matter what’s in it. Writing must always be linear, since we read one word at a time, but nothing in life happens all by itself. Coincidence brings simultaneity into your story. Used thoughtfully, it makes the narrative richer and deeper. Look to the right and left of your characters; see what more they can do, what they must do, to articulate in action that inner life we love so much. Like dreams, stories make feeling tangible.