Writers, do you ever intentionally add little twists of fate into your storylines? Do you ever wonder what would have happened to your main character if some small, seemingly insignificant event caused a complete change of direction to your plot? This line of thought is akin to the well-known “butterfly effect.” You know, the theory that suggests when a butterfly flaps its wings in China, the tiny air currents could create a domino effect that will eventually give rise to a hurricane in the Atlantic ocean.
Although the butterfly effect is similar to fate, it’s not quite exactly the same thing. I like all the possibilities of fate, both good and bad. It often occurs in real life, but it takes on a whole different kind of magic when it happens in writing.
For instance, think of these real-life situations where fate changed history:
What if Paul McCartney and John Lennon hadn’t met in 1957? Would some other duo from the same era go on to influence pop culture the same as those two?
What if J.K. Rowling had been happily married instead of a desperately poor single mother? Would Harry Potter ever have been written?
What if Navy officer John Kennedy hadn’t survived the collision with a Japanese destroyer that split his PT-109 patrol boat in half? Would Richard Nixon have been elected President in 1960?
Those are all big “what ifs,” but for writing, I like the small things that affect the lives of my characters. Things like… oh, I don’t know…making my character stop to tie his shoe while he’s walking down the street, and then a piano drops on him while he's squatting. That sometimes causes the reader to get mad at me, but you have to admit, it’s far more interesting than having the character drop dead from a heart attack.
English writer and humorist P.G. Wodehouse once wrote: “Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing glove.”
As writers, we need to become Fate. We have to make our characters uncomfortable. Can you think of anything more dull than a character who never has anything happen that will cause them to struggle, to have grief, to swim against the current of life?
We have to load up our boxing gloves with something heavy and harmful, and we need to hit our characters when they least expect it with all the bad luck oomph we can muster. Punch after punch after punch. And then, allow them to stand back up, bloodied, gasping for air, on unsteady legs, but facing Fate anyway.
You know why? Because in real life, we’re all damaged in some way, but we keep getting back up. So we can live.
If you want your characters to have life, beat them up. Then sit back and watch how they handle it.