It Would Never Work in Fiction

[jacey]

Some of the odd coincidences that happen in real life would never work if you tried to use them in fiction as plot-bunnies.

1) A friend working in the Emirates ended up on an internal flight sitting next to someone who had owned his house in the UK - two owners back - so they'd never had any contact with each other before.

2) Another friend flew to the USA and ended up sitting next to someone she'd been at school with twenty years earlier.

3) Two acquaintances of mine got married. Not unusual you may think however they'd known each other 30 years ago, lost contact and found each other again quite by chance and the power of the internet. (I had nothing to do with it.) The odd thing was that while they'd been long-lost to each other I'd known both of them for the best part of twenty years. They were from two halves of my life that never coincided.

One, G M, was an ex-patriot, hirsute Yorkshire folk singer, living in Oxford, and the other, L B, an ex-patriot Canadian living in Yorkshire and working for a community project for less able young adults. A couple of years earlier she'd upped and gone back to Canada and I'd all but lost touch. 

I'd heard on the grapevine that G had suddenly - after a seemingly woman-free life - upped and got married to someone from halfway round the world. Someone his friends considered very respectable and not at all G's type. They were amazed by his new-found ladylove and doubly amazed that G had shaved off his long, straggly, folksinger beard and appeared to 'wash-up' very well.

Eventually the wedding photos filtered through to me and I looked at his elegant new bride... and went... but it's L...

If I wrote any of those into a book people would tell me it was too implausible, especially if the plot depended on them.

Comments

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

When I was visiting my mother in Rwanda I ran into someone who lived in my college dorm my freshman year. And my freshman year in college, which was in Massachusetts, all the way across the country from where I grew up in a little town in an isolated area, I ran into two different people who knew friends of mine from my home town.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

The aircraft ones don't surprise me at all. The sheer number of trips people make means that they're pretty well bound to occasionally end up next to someone they have something in common with.

I once got chatting to a fellow rail passenger only to discover she was the sister of my best friend at university.

I suspect many people have similar experiences (or do if they talk regularly to their fellow passengers).

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I think the first two coincidences that you describe would work in fiction to start a story off. I think we've all come across enough similar coincidences in our own lives to make it believable. But further into the story, especially as a way of solving some problem for the characters? Absolutely not.