Coincidence, and planning

In the final chapters of Secret Spy, many loose ends must be tied up. The best way to take care of one of them was for one of the character's cars to catch fire.

Others who read the chapter said that this felt like a handy coincidence. Cars do catch fire, it's true. But when that fire drives some of the narrative in a particular direction that is desirable for the writer, and doesn't seem rooted in the story, then the reader feels manipulated.

But this problem was easy to solve: all I needed to do was weave into earlier portions of the story some hint that the car has a problem: a funny smell, a small mechanical flaw. Then, when the fire occurs, the reader will look back on the previous "hints" that something was amiss, and think, "Oh, that makes perfect sense! I should have seen that coming."

That sense that they "should have seen it coming" is a very good one to instill in the reader because it makes them feel as though they are in able hands: you as the writer have been able to insert just enough information to assure that everything feels logical, but you haven't put in so much that the plot is predictable. "Oh! I knew that car was going to blow up 60 pages ago. Finally!"

I wonder if aversion to coincidence  has a certain resonance to real life, as indicated by sayings such as  "everything works out for the best," and "there is no such thing as a coincidence." Perhaps this sense that stories all cohere is an iteration of the human drive to look at the events in one's life--or, indeed, of history or civilization itself--and be able to say, "Yes, I can see the pattern now, and it all makes sense. It couldn't have happened any other way." Of course, "it" definitely could have happened in a multitude of "other ways." There are no guarantees in life at all. Maybe the ending of a book is like the ending of a life, except you get a do-over. How nice.

I suppose this might branch into discussion of multiple dimensions, or multiple universes, or an analysis of reality, but I'll leave that to much smarter people. My goal is to avoid writing plot points that just serve my purposes, and are not sufficiently rooted in the reality of the story.