Plot holes can ruin a narrative and confuse your audience. Discover the most common plot holes and how to avoid them in your writing.
A plot hole is an unanswered inconsistency or illogic in a story that leaves the reader confused and unhappy.Identifying and correcting these inconsistencies in your writing is essential to creating a compelling narrative and maintaining reader interest. Here are the steps necessary to recognize and avoid common plot holes:
Inconsistent character development.
One of the most common plot holes is inconsistent character development. If a character behaves differently with different people or in other situations, readers may become confused about who they are and where they’re going. To avoid this, ensure that you thoroughly understand your characters’ motivations and personalities so that their actions are consistent with these traits.
Far-fetched coincidences and convenience plots.
It’s easy for a reader to become irritated when far-fetched coincidences seem to drive events and characters to move from point A to point B in a story without logical motivation. To avoid this, make sure that what happens is based on what the characters want and what they decide, not on luck or convenience.Instead of relying on chance or miracles to solve problems, make real problems that stop progress.Researching the elements you include in your stories is essential to ensuring a believable plot.
Missing motivations or mindsets.
Your plot’s lack of motivations or attitudes creates plot holes, leading to reader clarity and frustration. If your characters’ decisions are inconsistent with their personalities, histories, experiences, or goals, your plot may be discarded as implausible or unrealistic. It is essential to comprehend why characters act as they do and their motivations. Before proceeding with your plot, you must understand their wants, fears, and objectives. This will help ground even the most unbelievable stories in internal logic.
Lack of cause and effect logic.
Most plot holes result from a need for more causality. To avoid this, ensure your story’s events have a believable and logical cause-and-effect relationship. For instance, if one event leads to another, there should be a clear connection between the two. Given the character’s motivations and abilities, it must also be within the realm of possibility. When readers can trace events back to their origins and comprehend the logical progression of events, they experience a sense of satisfaction, and plot holes are avoided.
Contradictory facts are present in the narrative.
Occasionally, when writing a narrative, you may omit key details or include contradictory facts — facts that cannot be true. To avoid this type of plot hole, you must check your facts and remember the specifics of your characters and settings. Keeping organized notes containing all this information in a single location will make it much easier to keep track of everything, allowing you to refer to these details while writing quickly. Knowing the chronology of the events in your story is also essential; when and where did they occur? It is acceptable to be creative with timelines, but they must make sense within the context of your narrative.
Plot holes are gaps in the storyline of a book, movie, or other story that don’t make sense or go against known facts or the laws of nature.Common plot holes include mistakes in the timeline, characters who learn things they couldn’t have known before, and events that don’t make sense in the context of the story.
Before you start writing, you must make a detailed outline of the story and characters. This will help you avoid plot holes. Make sure you keep track of all the important details, like when they happen and what drives the characters, so that your story makes sense. In addition, it is helpful to read the story aloud or have a reliable friend review it to ensure that the plot makes sense. Take the time to reread and edit the story to make sure that everything makes sense.