That’s a coincidence!

Just how many convenient plot elements can readers take?

When I submitted the draft of my latest novel, ‘The Child on Platform One,’ to my editor, she told me it had too many coincidences. I had a bit of a sulk, then, as is so often the case, reluctantly acknowledged she was right. I went through my initial synopsis again, took out the coincidences that weren’t integral to the plot (albeit a nice convenience) and rewrote the story to appear more natural. In the end I’m sure it was a better novel and the early reviews seem to accept its twists and turns as authentic.

But it set me wondering…

Life is often full of co-incidences. When my then new husband and I were waiting for the plane to take us on our honeymoon, I looked at the family ahead of us in the queue and realised that the father was in fact the head of department who’d just offered me a teaching job, due to start two months later. (For ages afterwards he joked to colleagues that he’d come on my honeymoon with me!)

The late Victorian writer, Thomas Hardy, was famous for the contrived plot elements of his novels. Harvey C. Webster counted thirty-seven ‘major co-incidences’ in ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’ for example. Yet Hardy’s books are still considered classics.

The Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the term ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in order to explain how readers will accept sometimes quite unlikely elements in literature in order to maintain their enjoyment. If writers have gained our trust through convincing characters and credible writing, then we will enter into that pact with them and put our more critical judgements on hold in order to better appreciate the story.

It’s often said that truth is stranger than fiction and in my research for The Child on Platform One I came across several improbable events: the rescue of hundreds of Czech children from under the noses of the Nazis by a London stockbroker; a concentration camp where Jews were allowed to put on music concerts; a three-way hijack enabling ex-RAF Czech pilots to escape communist Prague. Yet all these episodes really occurred. Perhaps those seemingly implausible, yet actually true, events were stretching reader credulity enough. Any more apparent coincidences might be a step too far.

Either way, I’m grateful to my editor. Sometimes we have to make fiction more ‘realistic’ for readers to believe it – even though life itself can sometimes deal us the most unlikely synchronicities.