Deus Ex Machina

Deus ex Machina literally means God in the machine, and it comes from old Greek and Roman plays where the story conflict, (i.e. the Dramatic Question) was resolved by somebody playing a god being lowered by ropes (i.e. the machine) to the stage to sort out all the characters’ problems at the end of the play.

It has come to have a wider meaning nowadays, and it means any artificial or improbable ending to a story. For example the classic, “I woke up - it had all been a dream,” is Deus ex Machina.

I was explaining this at a writing workshop I was teaching, and one of the students reminded us all of how the 80’s soap opera Dynasty had ended - with aliens coming to whisk off one of the main characters. Now, that’s Deus ex Machina! They weren’t even being subtle about it.

I didn’t watch Dynasty, so I missed that particular gem, but even so I couldn’t help but be aware of the howls of protest that ensued from the viewing public. They knew they’d been ‘had’, and they didn’t like it.

One example would be where, say, the star-crossed lovers couldn’t get together because the woman had previously been hurt so badly that she could never trust again.

But at the end of the novel (about where the author’s nearly at her target word count, and suddenly thinks, Eek, I have to resolve this somehow!!), the character suddenly decides, out of the blue, “Oh, okay, I can trust now,” and gets together with the handsome hero. Curtain.

As I explain in Sacred Contract, you have a responsibility to your reader, and a contract with them.

Using a Deus ex Machina totally blows that contract up.

To honour the contract, in the above example, the story would have to follow the woman’s Character Arc (i.e. how she grows and develops during the story) as she gradually found the courage to trust again. There would have to be reason for her to trust the erstwhile lover (maybe he proves himself somehow). Then we could believe it, and then it would be satisfying.

It’s much harder to write this way, of course. (But hey, if it was easy everybody would be doing it!)

The Deus ex Machina is the resort of the lazy writer, frankly.

Using coincidence in writing

The only way would be if it only seemed to be coincidence, but was later discovered (by both your characters and your readers) not to be coincidence. Make sure that the clues are there beforehand - i.e. Foreshadowing - so that the 'coincidence' is proven to be totally reasonable, indeed, perhaps even inevitable.

Having said all that, I used coincidence in my short story Blood Sisters.

The two main characters met by chance, but it turned out that they already had a connection, unknown to both of them. However, I flagged this so emphatically. I literally told the reader that they would have some prior connection. Check out the story to see how I did that.

Even so, while I got away with it in a short story, I would never have attempted this as the denouement of a novel. The reader would have invested too much in the novel, and would - rightly - have felt most cheated.

For a compelling novel you have to have

• a challenging conflict/situation for the protagonist to resolve, and
  
• a compelling reason for her to have to resolve this conflict. It’s no use if she just walks away, saying “This is too hard, I can’t be bothered, I don’t want it that badly” (This compelling reason is often referred to as a Crucible.)
  

But a bigger part of the challenge of writing a novel is to come up with this impossible-to-solve situation - and then solve it!

No wonder the Deus ex Machina is so tempting.

A much better solution - both for providing imaginative, creative and unseemingly unsolvable dilemmas - and then for providing the solution, is to use EFT. I've given a case study of how I used EFT to write Blood Sisters. I use EFT to come up with imaginative, creative and seemingly unsolvable dilemmas - and then use EFT to figure out the solution! Try it yourself - it works!

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