Life is a random story generator.
Life tells a few billion stories a day, every day. And out of those, only a minuscule fraction are stories worth hearing. These are the handful of stories in which everything clicks together just right: for moral choices to have profound effects; for certain actions to lead to particular consequences at precisely right moments of time and space; for the fates of many people to intertwine to create the funny spin, the unexpected twist, the dramatic ending.
These are the stories that hold more than the average everyday randomness all of us are subjected to every moment of our lives. It's through this clear and precise causality chain, this clash of precisely incompatible views, this precisely right person at the precisely wrong place and time that can give a story a grain of truth or a grain of wisdom.
And that is what literature tries to emulate. We as writers want to tell stories that are among the handful of stories worth hearing that day. It is why the revolver on the wall in Act 1 has to fire in Act 4... it's meant to. Because if it doesn't, then our story is merely one of the few billion stories of the day that ends with 'some stuff happened, and that doesn't tell anyone anything of value, the end'.
Literature is not a dice roll; it's a gambit. It's believable enough to be born out of the chaos and randomness of life, but it clicks together just right, entwines fates, puts the right people in the wrong place at the wrong time, makes it so moral choices have profound effects...
So that in the end, the grain that irritates the eye of the reader and prompts a tear - be it a tear of joy, sadness, or sheer adrenaline - is a grain of truth or a grain of wisdom rather than a random speck of dust.
