The Thing About Plot Holes

After last week’s rant (I am still passionate about Star Wars, it seems), now something completely unrelated. Every longer story can develop them: plot holes. You set something up, you work towards it, then you get distracted, other parts of the story take over, and in the end the reader asks ‘What about that MacGuffin?’ and you shrug and act as if you have no idea what they’re talking about. You push a character to be a threatening villain, but then you remove them behind the scenes or in an anti-climatic scene, because that other villain is more promising. You put a lot of emphasis on a skill the character needs to learn, but two books into the series, you discreetly do away with it, because you’ve found something better or think it’s too overpowered. There’s a lot of ways plot holes can happen.

The obvious reason: not enough planning

As I’ve stated various times in this blog already, I’m an unorganized writer and not the only one, so for me and the others, it can simply happen during the writing process. You have something great set up, but then something twists your story and the great thing you set up is left behind. I usually try to remedy that as early as I see it and see if to remove that something great or use it somewhere else. Sometimes, things get even better when you reuse them, because the new use is even more spot-on.

If you’re better at planning than I am, you can avoid that by looking at your plans and asking yourself ‘Do I make good use of that MacGuffin there?’ and then act on the answer before you even start writing. If you’re not, you have to do it like I do - you have to hope you’ll catch it while you’re editing. If not, the audience will catch it at some point.

The ‘long haul’ reason: the series develops differently

Especially in a long series, be it as books, games, or on TV, plot holes are almost impossible to avoid. Sooner or later what you state in your current book, game, or season will contradict something you’ve put down before. Quite often, it’s only an accident. You mentioned a person or a place in passing in book #2 or in the first season and later on you can’t remember what you said and put down something different in another passing mention. Or you set something up early, to serve as a conflict later, but by the time it is later, a better conflict has presented itself and you leave the fans wondering ‘What happened to X?’

Again, planning is your friend there, as is keeping an eye on conflicts you have started, on the story threads you already have in your hands, or on places and characters you have mentioned. Still, you will sooner or later leave something behind which you once set up as something important. You can always exchange a conflict for another one, but then keep the first conflict in the back of your head, so you can use it a little (or a lot) later.

The game breaker: something is breaking the story

This tends to happen a lot in TV series. Since series on TV (or on Netflix, Hulu, etc.) are renewed on a season-to-season basis, you can’t know in season one whether there’ll ever be a season four, seven, or ten. This can lead to you as a writer setting up a person, skill, law, or something similar which turns out to break the story in the long run. You see that in many series which discreetly removed something at some point, because it would have broken the plot of future episodes. “Stargate: SG 1” discreetly removed a hand-held alien weapon which was by far too powerful, then let it return with far less power than it had the first time around, for instance. The same might also happen with characters whose existence makes a new plot impossible. Or with a law which conflicts with later stories - such as the principle that travel between reality and the fairy realm is almost impossible in “Once Upon A Time” in the first season, which is completely ignored in the last few. The problem with long series is that they get stretched thin and any limits you put up at first might become a problem over time. Yet, in the beginning you need to frame your ideas, which is often done with limits of some kind.

In this case, planning usually doesn’t help, because in the beginning, you can’t see how long the series will be and how difficult using a specific skill or character or rule can become over time. Hopefully, a bit of bending instead of outright breaking is possible when it happens to you. Or you go the “Dragonball” way and just push the odds up further and further until your characters are ridiculously strong and new enemies would destroy the world merely by blinking.

Those three are the most likely reasons for plot holes, they surely are the most common. There are other ways a plot hole might happen and other ways to deal with them, of course. The thing about plot holes is that they are almost unavoidable, because even thinking differently than the author will bring about new plot holes. The reader simply finds a better or easier way to solve a problem and asks ‘Why didn’t they do it that way?’ In such cases, the only good answer is ‘Because.’ The character doesn’t use the door instead of the window, because they’re quirky and always come in through the window. The hero doesn’t take the five more steps to the rowboat, because it’s more heroic for him to jump into the crocodile-infested moat and swim over to save the damsel. There’s no deeper reason, it’s just what the characters do (or don’t).

You can be discreet about removing plot holes, rewriting a large amount of your story to remove all traces of them. You can be bold about removing your plot holes by using a MacGuffin to close them. For instance, you can have a sorcerer rip the game-breaking skill from your character. You can act as if there never was a plot hole and you always intended to kill off the villain in such an off-handed way - just don’t expect the audience to like it. But then, you can’t please everyone at every point. There will always be someone who expected things to go another way.

Plot holes are annoying, but unavoidable. You need to keep an eye out for them, but you will never be able to keep all of your stories completely free of them.