We worry about contrivance and coincidence in our stories. For instance, in my novel, Why Ought I to Die?, the ending relies in large part on the main character being at a specific place at a specific time¹, a place he doesn’t particularly want to be at. I had to be careful, then, that the means by which he reached that destination were not manifestly my hand at work, that what I did I did through the already established character and setting. I had other options, of course. I could have had a message instructing him to return tacked onto a tree he wandered by, no explanation for said message’s origin provided. I could even have simply ended one chapter with him half-way across the island and started the next with him right where he needed to be. I was the author, after all, and in a sense, what I said went.

That would have been a terrible idea. Why, though? Why would contrivance, coincidence, or deus ex machina² be a bad thing? We all know there’s something wrong with those choices, of course, but we will be well served to learn not only that there’s a difference but what it is.

All three of these, ultimately, fall into the same category so far as the reader’s eyes are concerned. All three are authorial interference outside the rules of the story. In the case of coincidence or contrivance (the first being a subcategory of the second), the rules are not so much violated as stretched. In other words, probability is ignored, but the rules remain technically unviolated. Contrivance breaks the spirit, but not the letter, of the law. Deus ex machina technically covers all authorial interference³, but here can be understood as the author breaking the rules of his secondary reality. If contrivance is the characters being picked up by a convenient rider who just happened to be going the way they wanted, deus ex machina is them showing up at their destination after a scene break, no explanation given, with an impossibly short amount of time taken, or by literal miracle. Of course, deus ex machina has another form: instead of breaking the rules, it can just add new ones. When the gods, Zeus and Athena and all that, show up at the end of  a Greek drama, it may not violate the established rules outright, but it certainly wasn’t established before as an expected means of plot resolution. In a pagan society, of course, it may be understood as an expected possibility, but without that cultural expectation it reads as authorial action, not a native part of the secondary creation. The laws are changed after the legislative session was ended⁴.

So, why don’t they work?

At the core, the problem with such devices is that they tell the reader that the rest of the story doesn’t matter; they break the secondary reality, the ‘suspension of disbelief’. The introduction of such authorial interference tells the reader that any character, any part of the setting, any plot development, could be altered, ignored, or replaced at the whim of the author. It tells him that those elements are all irrelevant to how the story actually ends, providing at most a set of possibilities that may or may not be disregarded entirely. The author, after all, carries all the power within the story. Provided he can think of it, he can do it. If Tolkien wanted to end The Lord of the Rings by having Frodo swallow and digest the One Ring, turning him into a fire-breathing dragon capable of single-handedly whooping Sauron, he could have. The story would be rendered into trash, but in the purest sense of capability, the possibility was there for Tolkien, if he ever thought to try it out. The reader, though, knows from Tolkien’s meticulous adherence to the rules (explicit, implied, and tonal) of his secondary creation that he will not do that, that any solution to the story will come from what the story has presented, in the framework it has presented. Blatant authorial interference destroys that trust. Having interfered once, the author has no apparent reason not to interfere again.

On another level, too, this interference signals to the reader that the author really doesn’t care about what he’s writing. Whether he’s just in it for the paycheck or he thought that a few of the scenes were cool or he wanted the ego-boost of a book to his name, he didn’t care enough about the art he created to do it right. Instead of getting the result he wanted in the story by legitimate means, by set-up and pay-off, by establishing circumstances and rules that lead necessarily to the desired result, he short-cut past all the hard work and just did it⁵. It’s lazy, and the reader will recognize that. He’ll recognize it, and he’ll have a single question for the author, “If you don’t care, why should I?”

The problem that both the meta-problem recognizes is this: authorial interference places the answer to the story’s central question (will he get the girl, will the fortress fall, will he survive the war, etc.) in the hands of the author, not in the hands of his story. The story is, at best, window dressing to make the author’s fantasy look pretty. Unfortunately, the audience doesn’t tend to care about the author’s fantasy, not when it is presented as such. They care about the story, about the secondary creation he promised to display to them. Instead, having interfered once, the author makes himself and his feelings on the story the direct arbiter of all that happens, not the story’s own rules and circumstances. Unless you want to build your story around the meta-narrative of the author’s decision regarding the story’s ending (probably doable, but likely to end up just being another layer of secondary creation in the end), this kills the story- plot, setting, character, and theme.

The damage to the first three- plot, setting, and character- is fairly easy to trace. Plot dies first, at least to appearance; it is the most directly attacked, as the event is intruded into it without coherence or consistency. It dies more thoroughly, though, because setting and character are affected as well. The story’s setting is rendered irrelevant in the face of the author’s desires, as outlined above; so are its characters. Both become eminently changeable, untrustworthy, because the author could change both at any time, particularly if the first contrivance directly affected them (changing or breaking the rules of the setting, altering how a character acts in a singular instance without explanation).

Theme is a little more complex. When the author interferes directly in his story, he fundamentally breaks the mechanism by which theme, theology, is conveyed. The theology of the story is communicated to the reader by the story’s internal reality; here too it finds its proof. By breaking that internal reality, the theme ceases to be the presentation of an understanding of reality as seen in a secondary reality. It becomes instead a dictate of the author’s personal views, unsubstantiated by the story, dogma rather than doctrine. In other words, it loses all its internal authority, the authority of a cogent argument-from-experience, replacing it with the author’s bluster.

In sum, contrivance and deus ex machina breaks stories by making the answers to their questions flow from the author’s imposed and unintegrated desires, rather than from the question and its environs. In the framework established by this article, it doesn’t meet the story’s originative desire with the reality that desire was formed in the (as yet unseen) context of; instead, it offers up the author’s own dictates, resulting in a revelation not concerning the desire or question of the story but concerning that of the author, a question the reader never asked and isn’t particularly likely to be enjoying the answer to.

Next week, I’ll answer the question of why this matters, given that technically every part of the story is dictated by the author, is in a sense an authorial contrivance, go over a circumstance in which contrivance becomes much more acceptable, and wrap it all up with a nice, neat bow (let’s hope).⁶

God bless.

Read the follow-up here.

Footnotes

1 – Shocking, I know.

2 – If you have yet to encounter this Latin term, it means ‘god out of the machine’ or ‘god of the machine’, in reference to a trope of ancient Greek stage-plays. I’ll put in the footwork to define it farther on in the article. For more on miracles and deus ex machina, check out this (super-sized) article.

3 – I, and others, have used and will use ‘deus ex machina’ for contrivances and coincidences. Separation of the two categories is specific to this post, a choice made in order to prevent linguistic tangles later on, when it becomes relevant.

4 – In real life, of course, this is the government’s favorite part of the job. Just ask the ATF what a machine gun is.

Also, on secondary creation, check this article out.

5 – Imagine how empty the world would be if God had decided that all the set dressing of the Crucifixion and Resurrection- the Old Testament, most of the New Testament, the rest of history- was extraneous, and that people could be redeemed just as well while floating, unmoving and incapable of interaction, in an endless, blank void, saved by fiat-inserted faith rather than by saving grace which gives faith as the miraculous culmination of secondary causes (evangelism, etc.).

6 – Given I haven’t written that section yet at time of rough-drafting this statement, I hope I’m correct.