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Comment by Erlangolem | Hacker News Reader

I violently disagree with 19. The overuse of contrived means of creating tension is lazy, predictable, and frustrating. More unpleasant is the tendency of characters to become inexplicably stupid, inexperienced, and illogical under those circumstances. I’m not asking for purely rationalist fiction, but if the tension is utterly contrived, I check out.

Contrived tension is no more useful than contrived resolution of tension. When the characters suddenly act like idiots born yesterday, they lose any sense of depth or agency. If you want a prime example of what I’m talking about, watch The Walking Dead.

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Speaking as someone who really likes #19, you may be reading subtext that isn't there. Coincidences, in small doses, are the foundation of stories. Every story gets one extraordinary coincidence, because extraordinary coincidences happen all the time (just not usually multiple times to the same actors within a short span of time, which is where Deus ex Machina starts being levied). Star Wars is premised upon the coincidence that Luke should stumble upon a droid sent by his sister to find his father's mentor. Dune is premised upon the coincidence that the Kwisatz Haderach should be the son of the Duke who is assigned to Arrakis. Both these stories happen to use handwavey hoodoo to imply that maybe some ineffable higher power orchestrated these events to keep them from being complete coincidences, but this isn't strictly necessary.

People want to see the main characters overcome obstacles, and the above rule is just giving authors permission to spend more time considering how they overcome those obstacles (again, avoiding Deus ex Machina) than considering how they get into such trouble in the first place. In fact, this is sort of the opposite from what you're mad about: if the writers for the Walking Dead were more willing to simply let bad things happen rather than contorting their characters in stupid ways in ill-considered attempts to justify those bad things happening, it might have turned out better. :) (And of course, this doesn't mean it's a bad thing to avoid coincidences, it's just that audiences won't care about coincidences that create drama rather than resolving it.)

Dune is based on notions of grand manipulation over thousands of years; there is really no coincidence at all. I love Star Wars, but the writing is not particularly good.

Coincidence in fiction is ultimately a contrivance, and I don’t mean the initial conditions. 19 talks about coincidence being fine to get characters into trouble, but not out of it.

I read Dune as how that grand manipulation went wrong because of multiple coincidences. So i would not agree there is no coincidence at all in Dune.

The number of coincidences in the first 40 minutes of The Force Awakens is staggering.

In Star Wars, that kind of thing is often considered to happen due to the will of the Force, like finding Anakin on Tatooine. Some would call it lazy writing, but I don't mind in Star Wars' case.

Right there with you. A coincidence to kick the action off at the very beginning can be cool. Using it as glue leads to really awkward transitions, but I'll forgive it once. More than 2 uncanny coincidences in a season? No longer uncanny, I often stop watching.

Dexter became a coincidence parade after the first season. But I couldn't keep watching once he became bad at murder. Relatability isn't a virtue if your character starts with a premise of prenatural skill, power, emotional baggage or any other attribute. I do not want to see dexter leave his wallet at a crime scene, let alone over and over again.

I stopped watching Arrow after it became clear that every single villain was going to be related to him in some way. "A-ha, what you didn't know is that I was your father's limo driver!"

I stopped watching True Blood when Bontemps started running out of citizens without a mystical hidden identity. If that show had been given another season the sherif would have been revealed a water elemental.

I could go on.

Rule 19 reads:

> 19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

The rule means basically what you said. "To get characters into trouble" means basically the first third of a movie or so, or the point in the movie that "kicks the action off". So I'm not sure what in that rule can be reasonably disagreed with.

I feel like a reasonable man. I was writing about a nuance, a restraint on the unqualified use of the word "great".

Now you've given me a thought experiment. How to give a treaty of versailles treatment to a rant about TV shows.

I think you read the word "contrived" into a place where it was not. I think it's more like, "the characters heard legend that A could happen, but despite this they need to accomplish B. And of course, at the worst possible moment A happens and now they have to overcome it." It's like nature's chekhov's gun.

You're reading it backwards. The point being made is "never get your characters out of trouble by coincidence", not "always get your characters into trouble by coincidence".

I don't see item 19 as saying characters suddenly act like idiots or change their behavior. Stephen King uses this in a lot of his novels - where separate independent events occur to create a really bad situation. You, the reader, can see these things occurring and are converging to that situation, which creates tension.

19 has nothing to do with character.

    19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

Are we looking at the same #19?

This rule seems like a pretty obvious reference to Deus ex Machina. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina

19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

It doesn't mean contrived is great - it just means sometimes bad things happen and you have to deal with it, and we often don't understand the root causes. But if you rely on random good things to solve your problems, you won't have a very satisfying story.

This is just saying it is fine if a random car crash starts the conflict. But if a random car crash takes out the big bad, it's cheating.

Came here to say this. Artificial tension is the worst. There are so many genuine and real reasons for conflict to arise. I would add to your list that it's incredibly frustrating when the tension would be resolved immediately if two characters just had a conversation to clear up a misunderstanding.

Wow, violently disagree?

So stories like The Fugitive, The Shawshank Redemption, Fight Club, Leon, Snatch, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Up, Die Hard, and The Big Lebowski sucked because they made use of this technique?

Pulp fiction is great, in part, because of 19.

"Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating."

This is one of the rules I have a problem with. It's weird that so many people defended it with the interpretation they inserted into it while you rightfully critiqued it because you took it at face value.

Coincidences are rarely great. At best, they're a necessary annoyance.

You must have loved The Last Jedi.

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