“Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
Sometimes, we want to put an event in our realistic fiction that seems anything but realistic. Most of know, though, that real-life events would be called ‘unrealistic’ in a fiction novel. Real life happens independent of any of our plans or actions. Even if it challenges the reader, though, a challenging event or coincidence can be acceptable to readers if they are prepared for it beforehand.
I like to distinguish between events that are fantastic versus challenging for the reader. Fantastic events include alien invasions, dragons chomping on armored knights, and giant chimps climbing the Empire State building. Challenging events are based in real life, but may seem too well timed to be real. For some, this could be Job losing his family and fortune to a series of disasters in a single day. For others it could be a character winning the lottery just in time to stave off foreclosure of the family farm.
Many writers can make the fantastic believable, the best being in the neo-pantheon of authors we see honored in the Fantasy/Science Fiction Convention culture. But how can we make a challenging event believable to our reader?
Even if it really happened to us or to someone we know, a reader needs to have their mental house prepared to receive a challenging event. Writers of the fantastic will do this in a variety of means, one of the best known being a conversation between characters about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life prior to an alien invasion.
In the case of the challenging, a short treatise of a documentable, real-life event similar to that of your characters’ can be invaluable. The makers of the film Magnolia, for example, detail three urban legends of incredible coincidences in the movie’s prologue. This frees up the viewer to accept the interlocking lives of the ensemble cast whose coincidental connections are not fully revealed until the movie’s end. By this point, the movie viewer can accept these fictional coincidences, having seen real life ones that appear even more far-fetched.
If you want your character saved by a deus ex machina, this is not an automatic ‘lose’ for author or reader. If a surprise ‘save’ at the end of the story is important, your characters can hear about or discuss other, improbable, real-life miraculous saves elsewhere in the story.
Challenging events are not verboten in your story, if you prepare your reader beforehand to accept it. If we think about it, God Himself did so with Salvation history. Rather than surprise us with Christ right after the fall of Adam and Eve, he instead ‘prepared the ground’ with roughly thirty-centuries of typological figures like Moses, Elijah and David to ready mankind for the greatest, most miraculous save of them all.
