Aristotle in his Poetics tells the story of King Mitys of Argos who was murdered. Later on, a statue of Mitys was erected in the town, and one day the murderer himself came by to look at it. But while the murderer was looking at the statue, it happened to fall down upon him and kill him.

Pure chance? Cosmic justice?

Aristotle’s concern in the Poetics is not so much to answer these larger questions. His concern is with storytelling, and what makes for a successful climax to a story.

That success comes down, Aristotle says, to two factors, factors that are relevant not only to the blackly comic story of Mitys and his murderer, but to all stories.

First, the climax of a compelling story must be, to some significant degree, contrary to expectation. We don’t expect Mitys’s murderer to die in the end. We don’t expect Mr. Darcy to continue his pursuit of Elizabeth Bennet after Lydia’s elopement and Lady Catherine’s visit. We don’t expect Sam Gamgee to emerge as the hero at the end of Lord of the Rings. And so these story climaxes make us marvel.

But secondly, what happens contrary to expectation in a story climax must also give the impression of having come about with a certain inevitability. For “even among chance things,” says Aristotle, “those seem most wondrous which appear to have come to be as if for a purpose.”

Thus the death of Mitys’s murderer is the more wondrous because it seems to have been “planned.” Thus the union of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth and Sam’s heroics on Mount Doom are all the more wonderful because they are the result of deeper causes at work well below the surface of these stories (in a word, Darcy and Sam’s virtue).

For us to marvel at a story climax, it cannot come about so contrary to expectation that it seems contrived. There must be a “logic” to the unexpected, so that when it comes about we say to ourselves, “Aha! I see now. That’s the way things had to be.”

We love surprises. But we also love to discern causes.

Best of all, we love to have the experiences combined.

Marvelous inevitability. It’s one of the chief secrets of great storytelling in any genre.

How will you incorporate it into the story you’re working on today?

*The photograph above is of the Head of Hermes from the Ancient Agora Museum in Athens, taken by Marsyas and found on Wikimedia Commons.