Luck

Luck is a part of life. Life is a part of writing. Luck is a part of writing. Luck, however, is a difficult part of writing. To a reader, good luck is cheating and bad luck is unnecessarily cruel. I believe that the trick to putting luck in a story is to have some understandable reason for the thing to happen. If it sounds like you wrote yourself into a corner and used a deus ex machina to get yourself out of it, you will be criticized for it (and rightly so). If a person befalls bad luck for no reason or if the consequences of an action were far worse than promised or expected, then it seems like you're just being a jerk to your creation. It does happen in real life, sometimes these things do happen in real life, but they are harder to pull off in writing.

I think that the best way to be able to write about luck is to think about the kinds of luck that people can have. In my experience, people tend to have two kinds of luck. People either find luck or they make luck. I tend to find my luck. My friend makes his own.

If my friend and I were both in a class together and received bad grades we didn't deserve, we would handle the situation differently. My friend would go up to the teacher, get in his face, and argue that the teacher was wrong and gave an undeserved grade. The teacher would relent and change the grade. On the other hand, I would basically accept that I got screwed over and continue to live my life as I normally would. And one day, I would find myself with unsupervised access to the teacher's grade book, at which point I would change the grade to what I deserved.

In both cases, we had good luck. The methods about getting them are very different, though they both worked. Both also had the risk of failing. Luck is random, but it does tend to favor those who help themselves. What kind of luck do your characters have? If you can answer that, you can write believable luck in your stories.