Boring vs Unlikely

[khiemtran]

The section in The Silver Bowl between Daumin arriving in KC and the Fenye Scene has probably changed more often than any other in the book. Today's caffeine moment was realising why it's been so hard to settle on a single version.

Basically, there are two problems that keep coming up - either it reads too much like a boring biography ("Daumin's Largely Uneventful Schooldays"), or the events and their timing don't seem particularly likely to me (i.e. Daumin just happens to meet certain people on his way to the Poet's house who will drive the story along). I've sort of only just realised that these two pressures are contradictory. The _reason_ it sounds like a boring biography is precisely because I've taken out all the unlikely coincidences ("well, duh"). The story seems to want certain things that the plot isn't giving it. The challenge now is to work out how to make the coincidences believable enough to fit back into the plot (or to fashion a story-world where the coincidences are what is expected).

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

A rasfc discussion some time back yielded the following insights:

- unlikely coincidences belong at the beginning of a story, the *very* beginning, not into the middle or near the end. The further you are into the story, the more annoying they get, until they can kill the ending. Presumablly, you would not have picked these people to write about at this particular time unless something significant happened, and that significant event can involve coincidence.

- It's not a coincidence if the other side has a reason to be there/do that, *even if your character does not know about it yet* - but the motivation needs to come out at some point, at least be hinted at.

HTH

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think I vaguely remember that discussion. The first point seems to fit in my current thinking about story and premise. The big change I'm making is that I'm making sure each chapter is now driven by a starting premise, instead of the need to achieve certain things (each chapter does still need to do those things, but I'm trying to find premises that will ensure that the chapter does do all those things, rather than steering the plot in a way it doesn't want to go). In this particular case, what I've done is to move the coincidence into the premise. Looking at some of the better chapters, this seems to have happened naturally for many of them - at least one starts off with an outrageous coincidence (acknowledged as such in the narration), which sets up the plot for the rest of the chapter.

Thanks!