No. 05 / Robert McKee, a wise voice on storytelling, highlights an important point:
Story creates meaning. Coincidence, then, would seem our enemy, for it is the random, absurd collisions of things in the universe and is, by definition, meaningless. And yet coincidence is a part of life, often a powerful part, rocking existence, then vanishing as absurdly as it arrived. The solution, therefore, is not to avoid coincidence, but to dramatize how it may enter life meaninglessly, but in time gain meaning, how the anti logic of randomness becomes the logic of life-as-lived.
First, bring coincidence in early to allow time to build meaning out of it.
Second, never use coincidence to turn an ending. This is deus ex machina, the writer's greatest sin.
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I agree, Ehsan Rahimpour. I don't use coincidence in scripts, especially during the climax and ending.
"The solution, therefore, is not to avoid coincidence, but to dramatize how it may enter life meaninglessly, but in time gain meaning, how the anti logic of randomness becomes the logic of life-as-lived." I've never tried that. Thanks for the idea.
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You're welcome Maurice Vaughan. McKee actually urges us not to escape by resorting to a convenient plot device called a "coincidence," but to find an organic, meaningful internal logic within the story to resolve the conflict.