When I first became interested in writing, I was perplexed at how other writers failed to properly mirror reality. The simplest example is how no one ever seems to go to the bathroom in books. Surely, I thought, the job of the writer is to make their writing as real as possible. To capture all the details of life, both exciting and mundane.
I have of course since realized that writers, like all artists, do not seek simply to represent reality wholesale. Writers seek to craft stories that are entertaining to read, and for delivering on this objective it is more important to make stories feel real.[1]
Literary convenience is a tool that helps make stories entertaining. It is essentially the principle of only including the material that is most interesting and least confusing. It is impossible to exhaustively state all the ways literary convenience can be used, so I will instead elucidate it with a specific example.
In comparison to reality, writers tend to dramatically truncate the number of relationships that their characters have. Consider Harry Potter, who has two friends and two love interests throughout his seven years at Hogwarts. Or consider Bilbo Baggins, whose isolationist bachelor lifestyle made it easy for him to depart Hobbiton on his quest. Rowling could have thrown in some casual friends for Harry, and Tolkien could have given Bilbo a romantic dalliance or even a Monday night bridge club. However, though such changes might arguably have made the characters more realistic, they would have wasted literary space. When it comes to characters, writers follow a kind of Occam’s razor: when telling a story, use as few as necessary to make the story work.
This minimalism pervades literature. Only put in scenes and characters that forward the story. If it is important that time passes, convey its passage in ways that are as unobtrusive as possible. Sometimes it is best to avoid giving side-characters names to reduce the amount of information that the reader needs to process.
However, literary convenience must sometimes walk a fine line to avoid literary coincidence. It should facilitate the conveying of the story without truncating it and without undermining believability. For example, in many versions of Spiderman Peter’s uncle Ben dies at the hands of a criminal that Peter declined to apprehend. This is a convenient way to set Peter on his hero’s journey, but it is difficult not to see the hands of the author lining up the dominos. Some additional exposition could make the events seem less coincidental, but exposition always comes at a cost.
With that being said, not all coincidences are created equal. When it comes to coincidences, literature is the opposite of life: it is best when coincidences cause problems and when problems are solved by characters. When coincidences solve problems, it cheapens the efforts of characters to grow and change, and it makes the story more random.
In short, literary convenience is the principle that writers cut out all the extra stuff in life that doesn’t matter to a story, with the proviso that cutting out too much undermines believability.
[1] This description is not exhaustive nor exclusive. It is just meant as a general description.
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