Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Plot Black Hole

File this one under #WriterProblems, because damn if I can think of anyone else who'd have this issue.

In keeping with what usually happens when I plot, with my second idea being the better one, I've been working on plot changes for the new Shiloh & Alexi story this past week.  This started when I sat down to review the plot, in hopes of getting started on writing it soon, and realized that it had a slow, weak beginning.

I swear, going over my own notes is like deliberately looking for trouble sometimes.  But at least it leads to stuff that's worth reading, as opposed to what happens when I try to write a book without notes.  Anyway.

I've put the story through some significant changes already.  Nothing quite like changing the main location from a magic-heavy college town to a merchants' city on the edge of an over-enchanted desert wasteland to shake up just about everything.  The beginning is considerably stronger, and has the main characters sneaking around and getting into trouble before the end of the first chapter, which is a great improvement.  The antagonists' roles are largely unchanged, because I thought I could still make all their plots work in the new setting.

I don't have a suitable video for this, but please imagine a minutes-long clip collection of your favorite TV and/or movie characters saying "Wrong!" over and over and over again.

Much of the plot revolves around the antagonists engineering a shady deal involving ancient artifacts, and our heroes' attempts to both keep the artifacts safe and get revenge on the merchant house that screwed over both their families a decade ago.  But changing the setting to a less urban area got me thinking: what's there to stop the antagonists from simply doing their deals out somewhere in the middle of the wasteland, where there's no one to witness them and no one to interfere?  (Aside from some kind of magic-warped creature, maybe, but these people can handle that.)

I'd like to think I've gotten better at finding my own plot holes, and I'm quite glad that I found this one before I started writing the book.  It's far better to find these things after writing forty-something pages in a plot document than after writing forty-thousand-something words in a novel.  (Did that once.  It sucked.)  But it's not a huge deal to find a plot hole that requires some plot spackle in the form of a little bit of background story or a loophole in how things work.

As opposed to a plot hole so big it sucks the entire story into it, never to be seen again.

And so, I need to figure this out.  I've already gone through the entire plot to make all the alterations for the new setting, and now I'm wondering just how much more I'm going to have to do to make this all work.  I've already come up with quite a few ridiculous hoops for the characters to jump through to justify some of the shady dealings, and I'm starting to think the book needs more than a setting change.  The fact that I can use the phrase "quite a few ridiculous hoops" to describe my own plot is probably a sign that I need to do some serious reworking.

So: anyone else ever been through this?  I don't doubt we've all edited our own stuff and found issues that had us making forehead-shaped dents in our desks.  How did you get through it?  How much did you have to change?  And most importantly, did it work?

8 comments:

  1. LOL. Nope, can't say this particular issue is one I've had before. I stink at plotting, so it's a miracle when I come up with an entire story line, never mind the holes.

    So, without knowing any of the details, here, can't you just invent a reason that they have to do their dealings in a certain place? Like, the artifacts can't be moved outside the city (or village or manor of whatever) limits until they find a way to break the spells of protection? Or, like the main antagonist is a cripple (sorry for the non-PC word) who is house-bound and doesn't trust his henchmen? Or the city (or village or whatever) is on lock-down because of a recent plague/attack/whatever, and no one can leave?

    You get the general idea - make up a good reason they can't go anywhere and stick to it. No more ridiculous hoops needed :)

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    1. I did try this, and it worked, thanks. ^_^ Granted, I came up with something that changed much of how the story starts, but everything still works. So far.

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  2. You don't want a plot hole the size of a black hole, that's for sure.
    I had to rework a scene near the end of my first book over several times. I kept hitting 'no, that couldn't' happen and 'why doesn't he just...?'
    Liz has some good suggestions. Just brainstorm all the crazy 'what if?' scenarios you can think of.

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    1. Yeah, that's always something to watch out for - we can't have someone do something just because the plot says that's what they should do. Everything characters do needs to make sense, even if they're making bad decisions. But I've found a way to make things work, I think.

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  3. Yep, Liz has some good suggestions. You'll figure some of this stuff out away from the computer but most of it by just hacking it out, probably. I find that whenever I sit down to write, I can always find a solution but when I'm away from the story, I panic that I'll never figure things out. Go figure.

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    1. Both of those work for me, oddly enough - if I need an idea, I'll usually find it when I stand up and get away from the computer. But it takes sitting down and hashing things out in my plotting documents to figure out how everything actually works.

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  4. I've cut 10K out of my current WiP so far, and plot holes have definitely been in the mix. Best we find them first. Better out than in is what I always say.

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    1. I hear you there. I've cut thousands of words and rewritten as much as a quarter of a book in revisions. >_< It's worth if it the other option is to have a story that doesn't work, but it's never easy.

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