Hey! You! Get Back in That Plot Hole!
For writers, characters are living, breathing, wonderful friends who have on occasion to be entirely unreasonable, pains in the ass. You’ve spent many, many hours crafting out a nice plot for them to follow and then without your knowledge they have somehow gone from a minor character with two scenes to the main character. Or they are the main character but they’ve decided they’d rather be in a space opera rather than the period drama you are currently writing. Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair perfectly manifests this with his BookWorld characters who keep trying to escape from their published novels.
The solution is never to try and force the characters back in, you have to trust yourself as a writer to know that the reason they went ‘off book’ is because the thing you had planned for them, wasn’t working. Either the character doesn’t fit or there’s something wrong with your plot.
The most important thing I’ve learned when writing is that you stick to something in the video games industry they call the ‘razor’. This can also be called the elevator pitch. It’s basically the simplest, one sentence answer to what your book is not necessarily about but its core. It’s Saving Private Ryan meets Sex in the City or it’s exploring the consequences of anger or what happens to a girl when she loses everything her favourite shoe. It’s glib, quick and definitely not wholly encompassing of what you are writing. But if you are writing a book whose razor is a comedy about trying new careers, it’s not necessarily a good fit to have one of the lead characters die in a horrific gun shoot out. It just doesn’t fit with the core idea.
When I plan a book (something it took two books to figure out is a necessity), I don’t sit down in one go and figure out the whole plot beginning to end. Sometimes I have an ending, sometimes just one scene and then sporadically, over years I put all the scenes in one order. But when I write, I write mostly in order (I have done it the other way but continuity is a nightmare). This is where my plot gets tried out. It may look good on your outline but when you’re writing it out, it no longer makes sense for a character to say what you had planned. Or they say something completely new you hadn’t even thought of. Check your razor, if it fits, keep it. If it doesn’t, go back to your outline, figure out why it wasn’t flowing and then go back to your scene and re-write.
Plot holes are fine. Especially in your first draft. And you will likely not find all them yourself. It’ll come up in conversation after your very nice friend points out that it was odd how that character knew things before they’d actually been told. And this is a great time to re-examine if a) You simply missed this fact as you were busy creating a whole world of fiction and a simple line of dialogue missed your notice or b) There is more to it.
Sometimes plotholes are tiny fixes that a few outlines, timelines and checklists will clear out. (I can’t recommend Rachel Aaron’s blog enough for plotting a book http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.ca/2011/09/how-i-plot-novel-in-5-steps.html) But it could also throw your entire book into disarray. I had no idea what the deal was with pregnant women in my book Occasus until half way through, I didn’t even know what was killing them until I was 95% done my first draft. Because I didn’t know any of this, it created quite the plot hole and once I’d figured it out, not only did it change a few scenes, entire characters were now shaped totally differently. But at least I had a better direction and miraculously things I had been writing about seemed to click into place. Sometimes that unconscious brain is pretty smart.
I have spreadsheets, maps and an odd list of murder suspects currently littering my kitchen fridge. All of these help me get to know my plot better because it’s not just your characters you need to know inside and out. I have an excel outline (see example below)
I also have a word outline that has more details of each scene, as well as an excel timeline of the past and what every character is up to at each point in the book. The most helpful device I have for plot hole digging (sorry!) is a three page summary of the book. This you can give to friends and family and then when they say “But why is…” you’ll have your gold nugget of trouble.
So plan away: shape those characters; craft those settings and hammer in your plot. But remember half the fun of writing is blowing up all those things and going on an adventure with your new (fictional) friends.
As Tennessee Williams put it: “Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it… Success is shy – it won’t come out while you’re watching.”
Originally Posted - May 8, 2015
