Today’s article is a follow up on last week’s, and as a result of that, it’s not so much one article as two mini-posts put together, one on each of the topics I promised last week.

Section One: Isn’t It All?

In a sense, the entirety of a story is authorial contrivance. The author decides who, what, when, where, why, how. The author can, from our perspective, violate those at any time he pleases. If I write a story about two children looking for their lost dog, I can introduce an alien serial killer at any time I want, then have him turn into a rubber ball an instant before he eats the children, revealing that the dog was inside them all along. If any of you re-read that last sentence under the impression that you didn’t understand it the first time, you’ve gotten my point. Authors can do whatever they want inside the story¹, technically, and we all know it. What then is so wrong about deus ex machina and other contrivances, as discussed last week?

On one hand, the author does provide all the facts of the story and all their relations. Tolkien did invent Arda and Middle Earth; the myriad poets did invent Odin and Frey²; Sir Walter Scott did invent the plot of Ivanhoe. On the other hand, they all borrowed vast swathes of their secondary creations from primary creation, from God’s story of which they are a subsection. The existence of grass, for instance, was a borrowing by Tolkien and Scott, not an original invention. Logic (the essential assurance that when an apple hit the earth, the earth was hit by an apple³) also came from God’s reality (and ultimately from a reflection of Him), however these authors occasionally stumbled in applying it.

The fantastic elements of the story also came from reality, by a more divorced lineage, as can be seen in two ways. First, their authors were creatures of reality, made by God as part of His universe, deriving their ideas from that which they could perceive, primary creation and at least in the case of the redeemed the true primary reality, God. Second, the elements of Story, very often, come, to borrow Tolkien’s terminology, from the Cauldron of Story (the Pot of Soup)⁴. Into this, a thousand bits of primary creation are thrown, a thousand stories taken out, a thousand stories returned, a thousand taken out, each a different combination of the elements put in. Ultimately, though, these stories all borrow their basic material from reality.

All this does not stop nonsense. If you’re skeptical of that, take a gander at your average day in politics; more nonsense can be found there than Lewis Carroll could conceive of in a decade. What, then, prevents the author from simply taking a set of incoherencies out of the metaphorical Cauldron and serving it up as a story? On a purely physical scale, nothing. On an economic scale, apparently much less than good taste would dictate. On an artistic scale, an immense weight. The story’s story-ness requires some attention at least to the established rules of the story; the separation of the secondary creation from reality, the way in which it is perceived by the reader or audience as fiction rather than lie, relies on its assertion that, while not true here, in primary creation, it is within its own boundaries true. When the rules, particularly the rules of logic, start shattering under the author’s forceful hand, this distinction dies. The story is no longer a world apart from our own, which we can call real-in-itself-though-not-to-my-world, which can affect us as if it were real and merely spatially or temporally distant. It becomes instead a lie or dogma, an assertion of the author’s authority, a fantasy without the weight lent to it by a coherence which mimics primary creation.

The not-fancy way to say it is that breaking the rules you’ve set up for your story (which implicitly and necessarily include the rules of logic) will break the ‘suspension of disbelief’ which the readers afford to fiction, replacing it with the simple disbelief they afford to known fabrication. You’ll be a politician instead of a poet. Deus ex machina and its lesser cousins, contrivance and coincidence are distinguished, in a sense, not by the amount of authorial power exerted in them but by how that power is exerted. In a coherent narrative, that power is exerted to establish and fulfil rules (whether of tone, plot, promise, setting, character, or theme⁵). In either of these two deleterious devices, however, the power of the author is used to circumvent or break the rules already established.

Section Two: In the Beginning…

The rules about contrivances and coincidences get wobbly at one point: the beginning of the story. When they’re put at the beginning of the story (and nowhere else) we suddenly accept contrivances and coincidences which would elsewhere have us rolling our eyes. The two friends meet by total chance; the hero runs across the villain’s plans because his cigarette needed lighting; the teleporter functions at a million-to-one odds and dumps the protagonist into a strange new world. All these are contrivances. They also all have the potential to work. Why are beginnings different?

Beginnings can stretch (but not really break) the rules for two reasons: first, they make the rules; second, they ask the questions. In the story of The Wizard of Oz, the coincidence that Dorothy’s house gets carried by a tornado into a magical land would stretch credulity if it were not the premise. This beginning set up the possibility that tornadoes can indeed carry houses into Oz, irrelevant as that potential is to the rest of the story. It establishes, in other words, a rule: tornadoes can pick up houses and deposit them in other, magical places. It’s not breaking the rules or straining credulity because it’s now a part of the world.

Beginnings also ask the questions. The probability that Dorothy’s house will land on top of a potential primary antagonist is indeed quite low. The Wicked Witch of the East is, however powerful, a small target, even for a projectile as large as a house. This fact, though, isn’t a problem. Why? Remember last week. The problem with contrivances and coincidences, on a meta level, in the reader’s mind, was that they answered the questions of the story from outside the rules of the story. Such a contrivance in the beginning of a story doesn’t have that problem because it’s not answering the question or a question. The beginning of the story- it’s premise- is asking the question of the story. The witch’s death, of course, is not the central question of the tale. That’s Dorothy’s quest to return home. It is, however, an aspect of the question surrounding that quest, the question of how she’ll succeed, if she’ll succeed.

This does not mean a carte blanche to break the rules of the story. Those rules, to the reader, don’t exist yet, but in your perspective, as the author, they should always be in mind. After all, the beginning of the story isn’t just way to get the reader hooked. It’s also the part of the story that sets up the rules. If you break the rules in the beginning, you’re either setting up fake rules- the reader sees the break as the rules, not a violation- or making sure the rules don’t matter. In other words, when you break the rules in the beginning, you’re devaluing the story just as much as when you do it in the middle. You’re just doing it early, hopefully before the reader is invested enough to be really mad at you for the betrayal⁶.

Bear in mind also the type of story you’re writing in relation to the type of coincidence you want to use. A story which is defined by his hard-nosed adherence to logic, necessary chains of events, and intricate-but-inevitable plot points may require you to discard the coincidence and contrivance altogether, as they’re too discordant, even at the beginning, with the rest of the story (this could be termed as the rules disallowing coincidence altogether). You may here need to back up any perceived coincidence by a chain of events which necessitates it inside the story’s setting. On the other hand, a romance novel about two childhood friends reuniting on an improbably cushy island after their respective airliners crash near it has by its nature a much larger latitude for coincidence and contrivance in its set up- the readers know that such premises are in the rule book, so they accept them as part of the story rather than as the hand of the author. On their part, authors of series must be careful, remembering that the beginning of book two is right in the middle of books one through three. Here contrivances must adhere to established rules and must create questions, not solve them, lest they devalue the series as a whole.

Detective stories will prove a good way to show how the character of the contrivance, not just the book, is relevant. In a detective story, at least one of the modern tradition which is meant to be at least theoretically solvable prior to the finale (unlike Sherlock Holmes, but like Agatha Christie), the crime, despite being the premise of the story, is not that admissible of contrivances. That is not to say that coincidence cannot play a role in the crime; it is merely important that the crime itself be intelligible in the end, at least if we’re playing by the general genre conventions which demand such. The detective’s entrance to the crime, on the other hand, is much more susceptible to coincidence. In Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers (well worth your read, though only after the earlier books in the series⁷), Wimsey is introduced to the crime by the coincidence of his choice of honeymoon-house. He could, if the world is taken abstracted from the author or story, have chosen a thousand other locations, but this particular choice coincidentally allowed for his entrance into the crime that story centers around. Thus you see that different types of coincidences have differing relationships to their stories and must be understood in light of those relationships.

Some Practical Advice

Two questions will give you a good starting point on judging your own use of contrivances and their ilk. First, does this contrivance break my established rules or merely circumvent them, add to them? Second, does this contrivance ask a question or answer it? In the first case, ideally the answer is ‘no’. A ‘yes’, however, is not automatic condemnation of the idea, just of its present form. The value of what the contrivance brings to the table must be considered. Perhaps by this means the characters, plot, or setting will reach new heights of excellence. When such appears to be the case, the answer is to try and figure out if the rules or the contrivance can be changed to fit each other without damaging either too much to be worth it. Sometimes (often) the answer will be no. Sometimes the answer will be yes; sometimes the work is worth it. Meanwhile, for the second question, if it is a contrivance, it must never answer the question, unless it’s to ask a bigger question (though this must be handled carefully, so as to communicate the expectation that this may happen to the reader- in a sense, to bring it within the rules the reader expects the story to operate within). Further, it must maintain the coherence of the secondary creation of the story, careful never to pop the bubble and render it merely another fabrication. Here too a cost-benefit may be run when the benefits appear great despite the obvious non-usability of the current solution, deciding whether tweaking the contrivance- or backing it up so it is no longer a contrivance at all- will produce greater benefit than simply discarding it. Contrivances are dangerous tools, but wisdom, care, and a willingness to put in the work to make them viable can result in some truly impressive results in our stories, so let’s get cracking.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Yes, the medium can provide some restraint. Budget restrictions will change what a story can be in TV, word count requirements will alter a short story, and sometimes language just won’t do what the author wants it to do. These practical concerns, though, don’t really erase the point that everything that does happen, happens because the author (or authors) decided it would.

2 – The Prose Edda is what I’m particularly thinking of, but ‘Norse mythology’ in general will do as well.

3 – I’m essentially cribbing this illustration from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, chapter 6, The Ethics of Elfland.

4 – Referencing On Fairy-Stories by J.R.R. Tolkien, again, something you should be used to by now. Here’s another pdf copy, though I do not guarantee it as the same one I linked last time or the time before that. I’ve never actually saved a particular link; I just look it up online each time.

5 – Yes, all of these can establish rules. For now, if the answer to ‘does the reader learn to expect something from this?’ is ‘yes’, it’s establishing a rule, implicit or explicit, recognized or unrecognized. Note I’ve separated out ‘promise’ here; technically it’s a collective subcategory of the rest, but I think it (the promises you make to the reader whether he knows it or not regarding the other elements of the story, in all elements of the story including marketing) important enough to distinguish from the rest.

6 – Adding rules is perfectly doable, of course, though sometimes dangerous. Adding a one-time-use mechanic to set up your portal fantasy, as Frank Baum did, is a perfectly legitimate method and not deus ex machina at all. An argument could be made, of course, that the mechanic once established should continue to be relevant if you’re going to get maximum mileage out of every part of the story, as C.S. Lewis did with the rings in The Magician’s Nephew, but that’s a matter of discretion for the individual case, not a hard-set rule. The painting, after all, is really only part of the first chapter of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It will generally profit you, though, to ensure the reader knows whether or not to anticipate the mechanic being relevant in the future (generally- this type of rule always has exceptions).

7 – At least read Strong Poison, Have His Carcass, Murder Must Advertise, and Gaudy Night (my favorite in the series and well within my top ten of all time) first.