Tips for Young Writers 11: Don’t allow miracles (unless it’s done to add humour).

Don’t allow miracles (unless it’s done to add humour). Imagine this, the hero of your story is just about to get eaten by a lion and a gun suddenly falls from a passing plane right into his hands. That could be funny, but if you’re writing an exciting adventure story, you’ve probably just blown it for your readers. That sort of miracle destroys the stories suspense. If that sort of thing can happen, then the hero’s just going to get out of every tough situation through some sort of random miracle, not his or her own courage and ingenuity. Boring! Make everything in the story happen because of something that happened earlier. If a gun suddenly appears, it does so because the hero has stashed it in a bush, or something equally non-miraculous.