Everything has a purpose

When writing a book it’s important to not let things happen for absolutely no reason when, instead, you can use every single event in the book for a purpose. Everything you write must count for something even its little things like describing the atmosphere of a particular place, but everything you write must be written for a reason. When things happen in a book, like a house fire that’s witnessed by the character or a relationship breaking up it shouldn’t just exist ‘as so’; it needs to do something or be there for a reason. Reasons could be:

• A slow build up to an event
• A plot twist later on
• Background detail/information
• Emotional or personality changes
• Motivations or incentives for characters to act upon
• A chain reaction of events for plot purposes

Just say your character does in fact witness a house fire; you’ve described it well and it’s quite exciting but what’s the point of it? If the event never reappears in reality say, in the form of another house fire indicating something unusual is going then it’s essentially just a one off thing. It could alternatively reappear in the sense that it’s present in the character’s thoughts or in the impact that it has had on surrounding events, people or atmosphere otherwise the fire is essentially just a pointless bit of drama. Sometimes random things happen for no reason that cannot be explained but frankly this is your world and you’re the one controlling it so the things included should be generally relevant to the story that you’re trying to tell.

I have never written about a house fire before but I can imagine circumstances in which it could be used as a useful tool or mechanism for something I was going to get around to. Even if this fire is not related to your story it in any way, shape or form that still doesn’t mean it has to end there. The fire could instil a fear or paranoia in the character, the town could be on edge or deeply saddened due to a death, people may become more closed off or more willing to help one another, the character may reflect more on how fragile life is; there’s a lot that can be done here, even with simple or meaningless things. The events you write don’t necessarily have to all interconnect into one great web of story as, depending on your story, that may be more unrealistic than lots of random things going on. However, that doesn’t give you permission to write things for no reason as, as I just described, emotional and psychological changes caused by our surrounding influences are just as meaningful as physical connections in the terms of plotline.

I personally find a book that is jam packed full of random events that have no bearing on the actual plotline or characters to be rather tiring; a few are ok if it’s in the right context but after that it begins to feel as though the character has just been plonked down in a spinning world of random factors If that’s what you’re going for, crack on, but your character should probably start being affected by what’s happening otherwise they must be bordering on the inhuman in terms of their emotional capacity. On the other hand, if you’re following a specific plotline rather than an observation on the futility of one’s existence then it’s best to keep things relevant to what’s going on; even if that’s not immediately apparent to the reader. There’s nothing wrong with setting things up that seem random and unrelated and then throwing in a plot twist that shows the reader, “ha! You thought it was innocent but actually it’s all interconnected!” in fact, people love that in fiction; films included. Nobody wants to read and watch something predictable after all so it’s good to have a few aces up your sleeve for the later chapters and you'll hopefully find that you enjoy setting those up early on.