At first glance, what I’m calling grace might just sound like deus ex machina, which is (rightfully) maligned as one of the more mortal sins in writing. But grace and deus ex aren’t the same—they’re two sides of a coin, and it matters whether the coin comes up heads or tails.

I’m positing three components to grace:

The character or characters must have tried their absolute hardest. No casual shrugs, no half-hearted efforts—we have to see someone who’s done absolutely every single thing they can think of, and “left it all out on the field.” Their best has to be demonstrably insufficient. Like, not just “bad luck” insufficient—they have to have come up short in a fundamental way. It has to be clear that they never could have won under the given circumstances—that the deck was insurmountably stacked against them. The moment of grace is believable and barely enough. It’s not smooth sailing after that—it’s merely a lucky break, and it’s as small as it can get away with being, giving the characters just enough of a boost for them to reach the edge of the pit with their fingertips.

That last bit is why the phoenix in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe counts as grace, whereas the reappearance of REDACTED is mere deus ex.

Why does this wreck me (and hopefully your readers as well)? I think it’s because of the way it makes answers-to-prayers a morally acceptable part of the universe. I get the sense that—I dunno—fate is actually constrained, but nevertheless on the side of the Good Guys? Like, if God himself shows up with a whole second army, you sort of—on an emotional level—start questioning why He made the characters go through all that painful, traumatic crap in the first place.

But in a situation saved by grace, it feels like God is constrained—like the lines of fate have meaning and can only be delicately shifted, and therefore this is the salvation they receive, because it is just enough, and therefore the most that could be spared. It’s Tobias being given the morphing power, despite remaining stuck as a hawk.

Grace rewards the righteous, the industrious, and the valorous, in a way that deus ex invalidates them—after a deus ex, your characters could shrug their way to victory. After receiving grace, if they weren’t true heroes, they could still fail. It leaves the characters at the center of the story, and means that their choices still matter. Dash still had to keep running—it’s just that he didn’t die right then.

This is why Neo’s resurrection in the Matrix is a beloved, celebrated moment in cinematic history, despite being about as literally ex machina as it gets. He gets a second chance to fight, not a victory-on-a-platter.

(I mean, at the end, it seems like it would still take one or two whole movies for them to figure out how to beat the machines and wrap up that whole storyline. Can’t wait for the sequel.)

And it’s important that Neo be exhausted, to the point that he has almost nothing left—that he risked his life to save Morpheus, and then took a savage beating down in the subway, and then ran as hard as he could toward salvation, only to meet with a bullet at the absolute last moment. It’s that struggle that makes us feel that his prayer deserves to be answered—that he wasn’t just some Mary Sue hoping to get out of doing the work. The agents were simply too strong, too fast, too capable—he was never going to win without help.