Coincidencing

Editing is going smoothly, and in trying to reorganize scenes and make connections between characters, I've come across things that rely on coincidence.

In my story this doesn't happen as often, as my setting is in the first volume limited to three small kingdoms, and it has a lot of everyone's-related-to-everyone-else happening, especially among the upper classes. However, I've come to ask myself- what is taking coincidence too far in a story?

In life there are crazy coincidences. For instance, my brother and I visiting family months after our grandfather died and going to a 'paint your own pottery' place only to meet a woman whose own grandfather died on the same day as ours, across the street from our grandparents' house.

If this turn of events happened in a book, would you find it believable? At what point is coincidence too much?

The general consensus seems to be that coincidence becomes unbelievable when it becomes too convenient to the characters or the plot- once it becomes a deus ex machina.

A general rule also seems to be that if something makes things worse for your characters/protag, you're doing it right. However I'm sure it's possible to overdo that as well.

A good example of this would be Les Mis, where coincidences (as with most things in Les Mis, to be honest) are usually unfortunate for Jean Valjean. Victor Hugo also, as I have been informed over-enthusiastically by two friends in the room with me right now, plays a lot with coincidence purely because he can.

I feel like it also can make a world more real, to have random coincidences, because these things do happen in real life. To make a random character related through some convoluted tale and happenstance event, or have that apple fall on the old alchemist's head. It makes a world just as messy and intertwined as ours, just like having a character trip or stutter over their words makes them more relatable and susceptible to gravity.

I'm carrying on, in the meantime, and adding more connections and subplots- most of which revolve around family members and their hidden mischief.

Breaking Ice

I've just written a new scene-- not really a whole scene, just a new addition-- but it's the first really new material I've put into the manuscript in a while. It feels like breaking fresh ground.

Excitement is high though. I'm all settled back into school and life is a little less hectic now. I've been getting some organizing done, rearranging things in the outline and outlining new scenes that have to be put in. But this is the first actual change I've made to the document. It's the beginning. This is the big edit.

I'm ready to chop up this thing and make it good! TOUGH LOVE!

I'm only a little overwhelmed thinking about it.

There's a new thing, though! I'm in the writing club at my school, and we meet every other week to workshop. I'm starting to send them all my manuscript bit by bit so I can get critiques on it. The first meeting was the other night and it was the first bit of the prologue- the absolute oldest part of the manuscript (though arguably the most heavily edited so far) and it went really well. For what I think is one of the choppiest and immature bits, getting good comments really gave be some hope.

Hopefully this will give me momentum to be ruthless.

There's just so much of it.

That's all for tonight, I'll be back in a week with more.

Jigsaw-ing!

I'm currently going back through my problems outline-my giant list of doom- and fitting things together. 

I'm just going through and figuring out solutions, where i need to add/drop a scene, which characters need more page-time. I also have a list of new conflicts and subplots I'm going to expand, and I'm going to fit those in as well. It's a lot of color-coding and marker-juggling, but it's coming along.

Right now I'm not panicking- everything is pretty easy to solve according to this. Fitting things into the current writing however will be another task.

The last few weeks I've taken some time from the story, started a new novel that I may end up saving for nanowrimo, and done some illustration and reading.

I've just finished my first week back at college and getting back into classes and learning things is really energizing. I'm up for challenges right now.

I'm still running the writing tumblr, were I'm posting more about my other writing and illustration projects. Feel free to take a look! The url is wilsathethief.tumblr.com!

Here's what my mess of a notebook is enduring right now:

 

Have a great Saturday everyone!