>#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
With a little bit of retrospection, this seems to be one of the most powerful factors separating the films I've liked from those I haven't.
It's interesting to see how storytelling is like modelling - build a hypothetical universe with hypothetical characters and see what plot(s) emerge(s). If it's unsatisfactory, don't change the plot directly, but instead manipulate the characters until the black box spits out something interesting.
Reflecting on my recent viewing of Snow White and the Huntsman, it makes sense why Charlize Theron's character managed to get so much more developed than the others' - the character-centric story development process naturally produces a wide distribution of character depths.
Related is screenwriter Terry Rossio's concept of "Impressive Failure". Essentially the idea is that characters are defined by the quality of their failures.
Actors playing god were lowered onto stages to conclude plays back in ancient greece, this was called deus ex machina. Then some guy decided this was lame and cheap so he wrote the definitive book called Art of Poetry to say this.
Point is, don't use gods to explain away your problems.
Tips like yours makes me wish I had studied a lot more of the classics, drama, etc.
One "trick" that drives me bugga is the plot device.
Like all kids of an age, my son devoured the Harry Potter books. Trying to be a good dad, shared interests, and all that, I tried to read those books. As far as I got, Rowling would write the protagonists into wedge and then throw in some awesome new power to get them out. Like a bad Star Trek TNG episode or pretty much all of Dragon Ball Z (which was still fun to watch with my kid). Haha. Never thought of Harry Potter as manga before.
Anyhoo.
Compared to Neil Gaiman's efforts. Especially his children's books. They're perfectly formed spheres, without flaw. His stories are internally consistent and conflict resolution happens in a (suspended belief) believable way.
The essence of trial-and-error, rather than going directly the outcome you want.
It's interesting that even Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle only accelerates trial-and-error, but doesn't eliminate it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&t=14m0s For that, you need a declarative understanding, and an analytic relation from outcomes to initial conditions
A coincidence is just something which happened without a lead-on. An outcome surprising, therefore perceived as improbable (perception bias at play here).
Anything that happens in time has an outcome and things that follow it in logical order. However, we think differently if we flip the time axis, and look at the sequence of events leading onto a final event, rather than if we look at the sequence of events started by a seminal event.
The simple way to overcome this?
Put your coincidence in. Then, start going back in time, dropping smaller and smaller clues and building premise for the "coincidence" to happen. Finally, it's not a coincidence any more.
The difference between "coincidence" and "culmination" is fairly menial work. I am surprised more authors don't do this, and sometimes wonder if they don't include a build-up just to be intentionally cheesy.
If you want to have fun experimenting with the reversal of time in logical reasoning, please try a game I have invented, called Neutrino. You can find a description at http://cheater.posterous.com/neutrino (let me know if there are any problems). I have come up with it autumn last year and wrote a blog post about it, but forgot to upload it (or maybe there was some more work to do that I forgot about completely...) - you get an upvote for several reasons, one of them is that you reminded me that I should put it up! Thanks!
Your back-building of coincidence is essentially Chekov's gun, viewed from another angle. A potential downside is that if it isn't very artfully placed, the reader will see the significance before the characters, and grow frustrated at their idiocy.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, you're right, it's just something you can come up with researching tv tropes. Basically it's like the story teller's technical manual, and again, being annoyed at stupid characters will be something you fix by reading tv tropes.
In some fringe cases you want the reader to "get the idea" before the characters do.
One reason is to annoy them and create stress, which is often used in thrillers, where you can see exactly the character's going to die.. or are they? Yep, thrilling.
Another one is to give the reader a feeling of "superiority", in the meaning of seeing a grander scheme of things. By making this level of reasoning fairly predictable you can use this as fundament and build more complicated meaning on top of it.
> With a little bit of retrospection, this seems to be one of the most powerful factors separating the films I've liked from those I haven't.
In light of what I said above, it's not surprising the top commenter didn't like movies where menial work has not been performed. It's basic housekeeping. If that is missing, I can easily see a lot of other stuff missing too. Impossible coincidences are a symptom of illness, there are many other symptoms too.
With a little bit of retrospection, this seems to be one of the most powerful factors separating the films I've liked from those I haven't.
It's interesting to see how storytelling is like modelling - build a hypothetical universe with hypothetical characters and see what plot(s) emerge(s). If it's unsatisfactory, don't change the plot directly, but instead manipulate the characters until the black box spits out something interesting.
Reflecting on my recent viewing of Snow White and the Huntsman, it makes sense why Charlize Theron's character managed to get so much more developed than the others' - the character-centric story development process naturally produces a wide distribution of character depths.