What fate means in literature, why writers keep returning to it, and the 11 works in the StoryBites library that explore it.
Fate is the sense that a character's end is fixed before the story begins — by prophecy, by the gods, by character, or by history — and that their struggle only carries them toward it. Its great tension is with free will: how much of what happens is chosen?
Fate lets writers ask whether we author our lives or merely perform them. Foreknowledge — a prophecy, a foreshadowed death — also turns a plot into dramatic irony, as we watch a character walk toward what we already know is coming.
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