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Before I talk about what makes bad plotting I did want to discuss one thing—a smallish elephant in the room. The reality is—and I do clutch my pearls over this—is that some people either don’t detect or don’t care about bad plotting. I wrote an article in Craft about how I hate plot twists, and to quote from it:
Consider the hypothesis that there are two types of readers. The first will come along for any ride and will appreciate a wild ride purely for its wildness—they might even think that the label “thriller” or “mystery” requires a wild ride. The second type of reader, like me, wants logical consistency and reason—and they feel cheated if they get a twist or plot point that feels like it violates logic or reason.
What got cut from my original draft of the article was that the first type of reader is the sort who saw The Fast and the Furious 9 where they drove a car into space and said AWESOME and didn’t care if that made sense—they got to see a car go into space!!!—and the second type, the type that is me, finds that ridiculous because cars don’t go into space.
So the reality is some people don’t care about bad plotting. Some readers don’t read close enough to pick up on plot holes. Some just sort of shrug—so what if it’s inconsistent? Reading is supposed to be fun, isn’t it? It isn’t supposed to be building an iron-clad prosecutorial case. After all, the answer to the question “why didn’t they just call 911?” or “Why would that girl go into that scary basement?” is “if they didn’t there wouldn’t be a story.” On the extreme other end is the sort of hypercritical reader whose asshole is so tight that even a greased bb couldn’t make its way out. These are there readers who get REALLY angry about the logistics of time travel plots or what they feel to be loose ends because the story doesn’t end with a 10 page investigatory report clearly delineating the interpretation of all clues even if this information has already been strongly implied. (this reminds me of the reader who said something offhand to me about “all the loose ends” at the end of my first novel. There is literally only one loose end—who hacked the laptop, a fact which could not be known by the MCs short of mind-reading. All the other “loose ends” were covered in dialogue. One thing I discussed with my editor at the time is that a lot of readers want a lot more handholding than “there were fingerprints on the murder weapon gun” and “this persons fingerprints were on the gun.”
Anyhoo, this is all to say, sometimes people will get away with shitty plots. It makes me a bit sad. As someone who thinks a lot about the plot aspect of craft, I think plot is something we can all improve on. Don’t write for that lowest bar of Fast 9 readers.
I’m breaking down aspects of bad plotting into a few different categories, but let me be clear there is some overlap. Also, I’m not about to apologize for how many times I reference Game of Thrones (tv show, not books), because they are legitimately a master class in shitty plotting. But I’ll try to explain things so that they make sense to people who haven’t watched the show.
Literal holes. (and suggested fixes)
This is when you’ve done something for the sake of plot that defies reason even within the context of the bounds that you yourself have created. Many people have pointed out an apparent lack of logic in the movie Signs: aliens invade planet earth—and the set up of this movie is quite good, but in the last act the characters figure out that water is deadly to these aliens. This begs the questions of why aliens would choose to come to a planet that is 70% made up of stuff that kills them? This is a valid question but one that could have been rebuffed with even a simple line of dialogue. Man went to the moon even though the entire endeavor was deadly. Figuring out space flight was deadly. People died. You can die in space. You can die in a space suit. They could have died on the moon. People went to “the new world” knowing that the journey on ships would be perilous, the land may be uninviting, that the people already there might not want them to come. People still did it. We just have to understand why. It would not seem unreasonable to me if the aliens saw that the closest planet with valuable resources was Earth, and that they wanted those resources badly enough that they were willing to risk the peril of that planet.
In seasons one through four of Game of Thrones (as well as in the books) it is clearly drawn that traveling through this medieval world takes time. There are no cars, and people take horses or walk on land through perilous conditions. A massive war has broken out. It takes Arya Stark months to get from one place to another in search of her scattered family. Travel, in other words, has a cost. It takes time, and you might die. Towards the end of the TV show, the cost of travel disappears: they start effectively hitting the fast travel button. Jon Snow has a hackneyed plan to kidnap an ice zombie north of the wall and Dany—coming from Dragonstone, about three thousand miles away—arrives at exactly the right moment to save those who went on this quest. (and it’s entirely ignored that Snow’s trip itself would have taken quite a while—and the longer that trip, the more random it becomes that Dany just happens to know when to leave). How would you fix this? Let’s ignore that virtually everyone who’s seen the show thinks the entire kidnap-an-ice-zombie plot is stupid and thinks it existed entirely to have one of Dany’s dragons die so they could turn it into an ice dragon (ie, YEA ICE DRAGON LETS FLY IT INTO SPACE NOW). Let’s say we were going with that plot. Why not have her just come along with the trip..? We’ve already established that she’s the sort of person who cares about “the smallfolk” (more on that later) and if she believes that a horrifying force is about the threaten the entire continent, she would want to help.
In The Dark Night Rises, Bane literally picks Batman up and breaks his back over his knee. He then gets thrown into a hole in a far off place that seems like Afghanistan and Batman fixes his back by… pulling on a rope every day? He then climbs out of the hole using the rope and somehow gets back to Gotham City with nothing in his pockets. Contrast this with Top Gun: Maverick which I think handled this with humor: Tom Cruise crashes his fighter jet in the middle of nowhere and they show him walking into a diner and asking a simple and reasonable question: where am I? (A kid answers him, “Earth” because Cruise looks so out of place.)
Coincidences.
There are real coincidences in real life. One time I met one of my good friends at a restaurant in her neighborhood—sort of out of the way—and we sit down at a table only to discover my closest friend in DC and and another friend sitting right next to us. Reasonable coincidences are believable. In Stephen King’s It, before the group of friends is entirely solidified, there’s a part where three of the boys are playing in the Barrens—a wooded area where a stream is—and friendless Ben ends up rolling down there after jumping off the road embankment to escape some bullies. But Derry’s a small town, the woods are a reasonable place to hide, and the other three kids have all dealt with this particular bullies. And in the case of that particular book, something good is driving these kids to be together to face the town’s evil.
When is it unbelievable? When it stretches incredulity without explanation. DC’s a small town, I have a lot of friends, and many of my friends are the sort of people who frequent the same restaurants. Not unreasonable that I bump into people I know. SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE SALTBURN —which I will spoil without apologies because this movie had so many plot problems. In the movie Oliver (Barry Keoghan), a meekish boy who desperately wants to be friends with coolboy Felix (Jacob Elordi) comes upon Felix sitting in the grass. His bike has a flat tire so he can’t get to class. Oliver kindly lends him his own bicycle, which Felix happily takes, and this helps to progress their acquaintance into a friendship. But… you find out later that Oliver was planning this: he let the air out of Felix’s tires to catch him in this exact position. So… as someone who rides a bike nearly every day and has a lot of unfortunate experience with flat tires… Oliver knew the exact amount of air to let out so that Felix wouldn’t notice when he got on the bike and such that the bike would fail before he got to class? And Felix, an able-bodied boyman with extremely long legs sits helplessly in the grass, unable to go to class because he has a flat tire… instead of just… walking? It’s not wrong that Oliver planned for run ins, but the coincidence involved is just plain stupid.
Another aspect of coincidence that I don’t think people often characterize as coincidence is what people call “plot armor.” This is when there is a perilous situation, but we know our hero won’t be hurt because it’s inconvenient for the plot. Or that the author loves the character so much or thinks they are so badass that they don’t want to see them get hurt. At the very end of Game of Thrones, Dany is going nuclear on Kings Landing, just strafing the city with a dragon for no reason, killing tens of thousands of people. The dragons in this world are really akin to nuclear weapons. Arya is running through the city that is literally crumbling and falling down on people, everything is burning, and somehow she survives without any major injury. (this is after earlier surviving being stabbed in the gut and thrown into a likely filthy river in a world with no amoxicillin.) How do you fix plot armor? I guess you can fall in love with your characters—I think we all do it, but readers can tell when you treat them with favoritism. If they are going to avoid the peril that is killing everyone else, perhaps there’s a reason for this? (sorcery. the dark force wants to kill everyone but the MC. the disease only kills men and the MC is a woman). Or maybe they just don’t avoid the peril? There should be potential serious consequences for danger.
This feels unearned.
There are a few different variations of this. One really critical one is when a character does something that is totally out of the character you’ve spent many pages building. Returning again to the aforementioned Dany’s burning of Kings Landing—we were told that she just went mad. I don’t think there’s anyone that doesn’t see this as a horrific misstep and a total misunderstanding of her character. Character assassination, even. The entire series highlighted how Dany cares about the smallfolk. The supposed “evidence” the showrunners gave of her having previous instances of being cruel or unhinged were all exact actions that other male characters enacted in the show and were lauded for. This is one of those instances where you say “she did this because plot.” Because that’s what supposed to happen. But do readers come to books for plots or for characters living through plots? A plot is a Wikipedia summary of what happens in a story. You don’t really feel emotions when you read that. You don’t really see a little movie in your head. I often get characters confused when I read straight plot summaries. Human beings are filled with contradictions. People who go to church every weekend praising the good deeds of Jesus Christ can be cruel to the sick and impoverished. Friends and neighbors are stunned when they hear that a loving parent has murdered their children. I, a person who loves prestige TV and reads mostly literary fiction, also love absolute trash reality TV. If you build three-dimensional characters well, you will have allowance for contradictions and surprises. In my current novel, one of the main characters is this genius musician who’s pretty dopey and good natured—laughs along when people make fun of him, loves animals in kids. But there are a couple times he can grow enraged to the point where it’s a little scary: these are instances having to do with his family or when someone tries to take advantage of him financially. And these things are actually linked: financial independence is what allowed him to be independent from his family.
I think it’s fairly probable that George RR Martin told the showrunners of Game of Thrones that Dany burns King’s Landing at the end of the story. I think it’s far more probable that he had a clever way of making this happen that made sense. (a lot of people think it will be an accident: she uses the dragon once, not knowing that there are stockpiles of wildfire (an explosive liquid) everywhere. I also think GRRM has also provided a lot of evidence that the adage “every time a Targaryen is born it’s a coinflip” about whether they will be mad or not is a historical adage that isn’t supported by actual evidence. (Aerys II was mad. Maybe one other one, but they are no madder than any other dynasty.) Incredible turns of character can and do happen. The entire point of Breaking Bad is that it takes a mild-mannered HS chemistry teacher, the sort of guy who always returns his shopping cart, and turns him into a ruthless drug manufacturer who’s killed multiple people. We believe it because we see each turn of his personality. Maybe of the bad things that happen at the beginning of the show are things Walter White sort of bumbles into. By the end he is not bumbling.
We’re told something that hasn’t been shown when it could have been easily shown. Don’t get me wrong: I do roll my eyes when people say “show don’t tell.” “Show don’t tell” is something you teach a baby writer. The reality is that there are times where it is perfectly appropriate, even preferable to tell. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about when the writer has one or more characters say, “That Sherlock Holmes sure is smart!” Or insists that a group of characters are the bestest of friends.
I’m not going to believe that Holmes is smart unless I see him doing smart stuff. He needs to earn that label of smart. The novel Fates and Furies is about this couple, and the author goes out of the way to have several minor characters talk about how “epic” their relationship is.. but I don’t buy that at all because nothing about their relationship is epic at all…? I absolutely love stories about disparate people becoming a found family, but there’s a part in Guardians of the Galaxy that always makes me laugh. It’s early on after the group has gotten together and Dave Bautista’s character literally screams, “WE’RE FAMILY!” It’s funny because it was way too early on—we hadn’t really seen them bond enough. I have an ensemble cast in my second book, and it was important to me that they form a bonded unit of friends by the end of one part. I did that by showing them go through something traumatic, by showing how they deal with the trauma right after isn’t smooth sailing—there are still old beefs and different perspectives, by showing that they all view this as a thing where they are in it for the long haul, then a really important chapter where something awful happens to one of them—which isn’t really connected to the initial trauma—but they all rally around.
You are not consistent with reality. This is when the reader rolls their eyes and says, that would never happen. This happens a lot in movies where there’s an incredibly dangerous situation—the murderer is heading to a character’s house—and the person who knows tries to call them, can’t get through, so they get in their car and speed away. Instead of texting—the most immediate way to communicate—and / or calling 911.
But the world of fiction is one where vampires exist, where the police in a YA novel might actually contract with a local high schooler to solve mysteries, where aliens invade the Earth. We’re talking about premises themselves that are unrealistic, but the thing is that you’re creating the rules of reality for your own world. Someone who doesn’t think the police would hire a local teen isn’t going to pick up your book, but if you’ve set up the rules for what that looks like, and then go wildly out of bounds, this is where readers get frustrated. For example: in the absolutely dark and zany world of Nip/Tuck there was one season where there was a serial rapist on the loose. There are some very compelling clues that lead to another doctor in the area (a cisgendered male) except the police let him go because they discover that he does not have a penis because of an accident that occurred when he was baby. It strains credulity that the police couldn’t fathom the idea of rape occurring without a penis. Another plot device I’ve seen many many times is teenagers in high school who absolutely need that scholarship and it is a total dichotomy: either they get this particular scholarship or they don’t got to college at all and their life is ruined and they will work in their family’s fish shack until they die. Apparently student loans don’t exist in these worlds. At risk might be a particular college, but not college in general.
You flat out cheated. You told the reader character A was in location B, but then conveniently forget this in order to make a crazy twist. (The Dothraki are decimated by ice zombies in The Long Night but reappear when Dany makes her “I’m going to conquer the universe now that I’m mad” speech.) You say, magic can work this way but not that way, except ~wait I have a surprise for you~. The example that I used the the abovementioned article “Against Twists” is when Annie Wilkes in Misery describes these serials she used to see in movie theaters as a kid. In one, the cliffhanger was that the hero was tied up in a car that went off a cliff. But in the continuing episode, oh guess what, actually he got off before he went off the cliff, even though previously it was clearly shown that he did not do this. In the 1999 Denzel Washington thriller The Bone Collector, there is a part where they show the killer wearing a mask. They actually zoom in on his face where you can see his very distinctive piercing blue eyes. Another detective who knows Washington happens to have these distinct piercing blue eyes. It is then revealed that Piercing Blue Eyes Detective is NOT the killer. Literally the actor with the piercing blue eyes, Michael Rooker, is filmed with the mask on for that scene, rather than using the actor who actually is the killer. Don’t do this. And I think the most likely culprit is when someone wants to manufacture a really wild twist and doesn’t care how much logic they have to leave behind in order to do it.
Not enough plot.
There are books with not enough plot, even ones that do really well. My Year of Rest and Relaxation for example, is about a woman literally trying to sleep her way through life by taking various prescription drugs to pass the time. If there are published books where very little happens, I’m willing to bet virtually all of them are literary fiction. Particularly, books where the point isn’t the plot, but the prose is. Or the mood. Or vibes. There are absolutely people querying literary novels where very little happens, probably even using My Year of Rest and Relaxation as a comp who will not be picked up because people think their books are “too quiet” or they “weren’t enough to grab me.” If you write a book where very little happens and it’s genre, you’re probably shot, if it’s literary it’s still going to be uphill because you’d have to find an agent and editor and acquisitions board that is willing to go to bat for “a quiet book.” (Rest and Relaxation was not a debut novel and its author was already a literary darling before then.)
I have an embarrassingly simple solution to the “not enough plot” problem. Take an index card for each of your scenes and draw a line down the middle. On the left write what actually happens that moves the plot forward and on the right write what critical information we learn here that does not actually move the plot forward. For example: left side: Harry Potter is invited to Hogwarts. Right side: Harry’s adopted family sucks. A lot of people will write multiple scenes were nothing happens. They’re confusing contextual information with plot. If you have an index card where there’s no stuff on the left but stuff on the right, take the stuff that’s on the right and work it into a plot scene. Eg, you can show Amanda’s relationship with her mother when they get the phone call saying she unexpectedly got the job offer overseas. You don’t need a separate scene where they are just drinking tea that serves no purpose other than showing their relationship. Also, if you have multiple index cards where the plot that happens in the same, really considering that. We don’t need to see three instances of Bob cheating for us to know he is a cheater. Don’t do the same plot point unless you’ve added something to it.
Too much plot.
“Too much plot” can actually be great. Say what you will about Marvel movies but Avenger’s Infinity War impressed me with its plot: it starts right away, every single scene moves the plot along at a fast clip, and many, many things happen. I remember when that movie ended being surprised that it was 2.5 hours because it did not feel 2.5 hours because 1) things kept happening and 2—critically) I never got confused.
When you see too much plot and it’s not working there are typically a few culprits 1) there are too many characters and I’m unclear on their roles/who they are 2) I’m actually confused about what is literally happening 3) I’m unclear why things are happening 4) author is hyper-describing too many details. For too many characters, ask yourself how many of those characters absolutely have to be there and how many of them need to be named? In one of my unpublished books there was a Navy SEAL raid and I did enough research to know how many people would be on a raid like that. I named the characters who were important, made it clear there were others there, but didn’t feel the need to specify them. The more things there are happening, the more grounded I need to feel in characters. A lot of people are told to start the first ten pages with a bang: have something exciting happen, instead of having a character wake up and contemplate their day. What actually ends up happening is that people will open their book with a chaotic action scene where it’s both hard to follow what’s happening and I don’t care about any of the characters. If readers are telling you they are confused about your plot, put your manuscript down and do a detailed plot synopsis. No more than three sentences per chapter, what happens? Why does it happen? Have you made the why clear? Is the how clear? Is this a side quest? Are you repeating a plot point? Is there a more elegant way of getting from A to C than B1 B2 B3 B4 flashback about B0?
Lack of emotional resonance
This is a complex one because it may or may not be about plot. Someone may have constructed a perfect puzzle, or an easy A to B to C and somehow it doesn’t work. It doesn’t feel satisfying. It might be because you build up to something but then we don’t get to experience the satisfaction of getting the thing we wanted. In Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War there’s a pair of lovebirds you really want to get together, but also there’s a war, and also something else really horrible that happens, and the lovebirds getting together is actually a quick aside. No, I at least wanted a more satisfying scene of them getting together and being together! Or if you say it’s going to be very difficult to get to Mordor, so perilous, and spend so much time talking about that but the actual journey doesn’t seem that perilous, the ending isn’t going to feel emotionally satisfying.
If the entire book revolves around a characters desire to achieve something, and they get that something and no one cares, it’s either because no one cares about the character, the stakes weren’t clear, the journey wasn’t that interesting. I’ve written elsewhere on how you can have your writing have heart, but in addition to that, I don’t care about the journey your character goes on if they are a cardboard cutout and not a fully fleshed out character. I need to under why they need what they need even if I don’t happen to agree that that is the thing they need. It can’t be too easy to get, or so complicated I lose interest. I can write more later on how complicated plot should be for writers of different stages
I really enjoyed Knives Out, even after a re-watch, but my friend was very annoyed with it because the time it takes the second character to die from a drug overdose is quite long, which makes it impossible to pinpoint the identity of the killer. Either the movie "cheated" or we're supposed to assume that one character can die quickly from a drug overdose and another can die slowly from an overdose of the same drug. Either way, I think it's a fun movie because I'm just along for the ride, but anyone who really examines the twist is going to be frustrated!
This was terrific. As I was reading that I was mentally grading my work on whether I made these errors or not. I feel like I passed but reflecting on this essay makes me want to pay more attention to plot issues in the future. Really enjoyed this read!