Nothing breaks my immersion in a story quite so much as a coincidence.

No spoilers, but two points in season 2 of The Last of Us with coincidences so angered me that I had to turn off the TV and stop watching. One was just completely unlikely, and the other was very unlikely but they tried to justify it later.

And rewatching the last episode of season 2 of Strange New Worlds, in preparation for the new season, the one person who survives an attack that kills 200 is by coincidence the only regular cast member who was aboard that ship.

This rant is prompted because I’d just re-read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huck Finn in preparation for reading James. Spoilers ahead. The coincidences in Tom Sawyer are ridiculous:

  • The one night that Huck and Tom go to the graveyard they go at precisely the right time to witness Joe commit a murder. Were this the opening scene of a story, it might be justifiable.
  • Later the boys are searching for treasure and happen to be hiding upstairs the moment Joe discovers buried treasure himself!
  • Finally, Tom and Becky are lost so deep in the caves no rescuer can find them, but Tom happens to randomly stumble across Joe in the caves.

Nor are the coincidences any better in Huck Finn. When Jim is captured 1,100 miles south of home, Huck goes to the plantation house where Jim is being held captive and pretends to be a long-awaited visitor. But when he’s about to have to reveal the truth, he discovers that the long-awaited visitor is none other than Tom Sawyer!

Ugh.

James—a retelling of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective by Percival Everett—has more coincidences than typical of a novel these days, given its source material, but the author dials it back from Huck Finn.

While I loathe coincidences now, as a kid one of my favorite coincidences was when the compass of John Carter’s flier is damaged and he flies across Mars at random for thousands of miles, only to be shot down right above his friend Tars Tarkas, just in the nick of time to save his life!

We’ve come a long way from when coincidence was seen as divine intervention in myths and ancient plays. Or from when authors like Charles Dickens relied on coincidence to pull together novels they were publishing a chapter at a time. Even as more literary works started to avoid coincidence, pulp writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs leaned into them.

Obviously coincidences happen in real life. I was visiting New York City with a co-worker, and he started telling a story about an old friend from Chicago who years before had taken him to a great restaurant that he couldn’t remember, and as he was telling the story we ran into that old friend! The odds against that seemed astronomical at the time. Ironic twist: the restaurant had gone out of business.

But fiction operates under different rules. In my current reading and media consumption, I’d prefer coincidences that complicate rather than simplify, that happen early, perhaps establishing the story, rather than providing an easy way out for the author (or writing room).

Image credit: Achille Sirouy, Les Aventures de Huck Finn, 1886.