UNLIKELY STORY

by Robert Lopresti

Early this morning at the library I checked the Straight Dope to see what wisdom Cecil Adams had uncovered. You’d be surprised how often the questions readers throw at him can help with questions that pop up at the reference desk.

I admit, that today’s question was an unlikely candidate for that. Cecil was talking about Steve Miller’s song “The Joker,” which includes the mysterious phrase “the pompatus of love.”

A few minutes later I marched to another part of the library to pick up some journals I peruse for book reviews. The first thing I scooped up was the latest issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly and guess what was on the cover? An old poster for a Steve Miller Band concert in Portland.

I hadn’t thought of Steve Miller in years and now he had appeared twice in five minutes. Such are the ways of coincidence.

So here’s my question

Would you put a coincidence like that in a story? If you do — and especially if it is an important story point — some readers will roll their eyes and mutter about unlikely events, deus ex machina, and such. The problem is that while the event really happened, it wasn’t likely. We have each experienced coincidences more dramatic than that one. But do you dare to put them into a tale?

Somebody once said that the difference between reality and fiction is that God is under no obligation to be plausible. (And another difference, now that I think about it, is that He is not required to provide a satisfactory ending.)

Earlier this year I picked up the first book in a series by a well-known mystery writer. The concept for the series was great, right up my alley, and I was looking forward to reading them all. Well. The book begins with the heroine escaping from the police by accidentally meeting a stranger who is probably the one person in the city with both motive and method for her to flee. By my count the heroine needed five big coincidences to fall her way in order to struggle through the book. I won’t be reading anymore of that series.

If there had been only one lucky break I could have lived with it, and that’s a good rule of thumb, I think. One coincidence passes muster. Two and you’re in trouble.

Enter the shadow

This is one of the many times when foreshadowing can be your friend. I believe it was Lawrence Block, back when he wrote a column for Writer’s Digest, who pointed out a fine example in Steven King’s The Dead Zone. Early in the book a lightning rod salesman stops by a bar and tries to sell the owner a rod, explaining that the tavern’s location makes it a perfect target, etc. The owner turns him down and the salesman vanishes from the book, never to be seen again.

Much later the tavern is struck by lightning at exactly the moment the plot needs it to happen. In reality, this is no more likely to have occurred than it would have been without the salesman’s appearance, but this bit of foreshadowing takes the curse off. The reader doesn’t say oh please, how unlikely. Instead they think, ha, the lightning rod guy was right.

It occurred to me after I started writing this that I have a story out in the mails right now, looking for a good home, and that story is entirely dependent on a single huge coincidence. I wrapped it up in as much foreshadowing as possible, trying to make it look inevitable, but in the end it depends on how it feels to the editor. As the old comedy slogan goes, “If you buy the premise, you buy the bit.”

So now my story is in the hands of fate. Or possibly, of the Pompatus of Love.

Another thread from the web

I am writing this column on my lunch hour at work, using my laptop computer. Normally I save it to the machine and use a flash drive to carry it home to my main PC. But recently I discovered Google Documents. You can upload word documents or spreadsheets to a free account there and access them anytime.

This makes it extremely easy to collaborate with someone who is using a different machine. And having an extra copy of your documents is always a good idea, because you never know when your own system may