Nobody wants to write themselves into a plot hole, but how can you avoid that? Can plot holes be fixed? Keep reading to learn how to write a plot that makes sense (or fix a plot that doesn’t).
If you want an easy way to apply everything you learn in this post, you should get the Plot Without Holes workbook that comes with all the questions you need to fix or avoid plot holes, including a video of me walking you through the whole thing.
Related reading: How to use story structure to plot your story – How to edit a novel without getting overwhelmed – The right way to write character flaws – How to write a plot twist
What is a plot hole?
You’ve probably heard of plot holes, but what actually counts as one?
When you’ve got a plot event in your story that can’t be explained with what exists in that story or isn’t congruent with anything you’ve told your readers, you’ve got a plot hole.
What ISN’T a plot hole is when a reader disagrees with something that happens just because they personally would act differently or would expect different results.
You can make anything make sense in your story, so going against real-world logic doesn’t necessarily lead to a plot hole. Things that don’t make sense in your story also don’t necessarily equal a plot hole, but it’s still unfortunate if reading it makes your readers go “yeah, no, I’m not buying that”.
No, you don’t need to over-explain everything
To make something make sense, you don’t need to devote pages upon pages to explaining it. Sometimes it’s a question of briefly mentioning something or having something similar happen previously. Sometimes things are explained after the fact, but even in those cases, I’d recommend planting at least a tiny clue beforehand.
The important thing is that you have something on the page that you can point at. There’s no need to underestimate your readers and hammer it in.
Yes, some people are bad at reading, and others will refuse to accept that anything outside their personal experience could be true. You shouldn’t be writing for those people, though, because there will always be someone who doesn’t get it. Someone will always say “I don’t understand why they didn’t just walk over the bridge” even when it was explained that there’s a man-eating troll living under it.
Aren’t plot holes subjective? Aren’t there plot holes in every movie and book?
No and no. The fact that someone didn’t personally understand something doesn’t make it a plot hole, like I said earlier.
I didn’t realise this was something that people thought until I was looking for points to include in this post, so here we are. Please read the rest of the post, too, if you’re still confused, I promise I’ll walk you through it all.
How to avoid plot holes
When I was researching what people want to know about plot holes, I ran into spectacularly bad advice: “Just read what you’ve written the last time you were writing your story!” No!!! First of all, that could you considerably slow you down and waste your writing time on reading, but it won’t even necessarily be helpful. So what if you read the last five pages you’ve written? Do you remember everything you’ve written fifty pages ago??
Here’s what’s actually going to help:
Plan your plot beforehand
If you’re improvising your entire plot as you write it, it’s no wonder you’ll end up with loose ends, dead ends and plot holes. I know there are always writers who don’t want to outline their stories, but you asked how to avoid plot holes, and here’s an answer for you.
No, you don’t need to know every single thing that happens in your story, but you should have at least your major plot events planned out. Focus especially on your protagonist, their Big Problem and how this big-ass problem gets solved. We’ll talk about this in more detail next, but I really wanted to point out that planning your story is much more effective then constantly re-reading everything you’ve written.
To learn more about outlining your stories, you can read about my methods of outlining or kick-start the process by getting the Genius Plotting System.
Know why ANYTHING happens in your story
The simplest way to avoid plot holes in your story is to be aware of why anything happens, and then make sure your readers know it too. If you’re writing a plot twist, you can be subtle with your clues, but you still need to have something that you can point at and say “see, the evidence was there all along”.
The biggest thing you need to consider here is your protagonist and their Big Problem, also known as the main conflict, and how the problem ultimately gets solved. Think of these questions:
- Why is this problem a problem for this character in particular? (Hint: you need to look at their flaws.)
- Would this problem really happen in this world, and what set it in motion?
- Why doesn’t the character just walk away from it?
Those are extremely important things to consider and they’re pretty much the foundation for setting up your story the right way. Let’s continue with the solution to the problem:
- If the solution is obvious to anyone reading your story, what are the reasons why your character doesn’t figure it out straight away?
- The Big Problem is a problem because your character doesn’t have an easy solution to it straight away or isn’t able to solve it the way they know they should. But why?
- How does the character eventually realise what the right solution is and get the necessary skills or information for it?
- How is it believable that your character solved the problem even though they were completely unequipped for it in the beginning?
You, as the writer, need to know all these things, but your readers need to know them as well, so don’t neglect to show them. And when you know the why to everything, make sure it fits with the world you’ve created.
There are so many questions you need to know the answers to, and you can find them in the Plot Without Holes workbook.
Make every scene make sense, too
It’s not just the overall plot that needs to make sense, your scenes have a responsibility, too. (You can read more about scene structure here.)
Every scene starts with a goal: your point-of-view character wants something. It needs to be related to their story goal, which is solving the Big Problem. Then, more often than not, something needs to get in the way of solving that problem, and this scene conflict needs to be rooted in your story world somehow. (As in, don’t make it come out of nowhere.)
A goal plus an obstacle equals an outcome that is different from what your POV character wanted or expected, and the character has a reaction to this outcome. A reaction happens on the inside as feelings and thoughts, and comes out as words and actions.
Some more “intellectualized” thinking is also required, meaning that your character needs to have a proper think about what happened, what it means and what to do next. They’ll decide on some kind of a new goal that leads to a new scene.
So, considering your character, your setting and past events, does all that make sense in every scene? If an obstacle comes out of nowhere or a character acts in a way that doesn’t fit with anything we know and it isn’t explained later, you might have a plot hole in your scene.
Don’t have your characters act out of character
When a character acts out of character, i.e. in a way that doesn’t make sense, that can also be a plot hole. We’ll also talk about this subject a little further when we talk about set-ups, but I wanted to give it its own section, too.
People are complex, yes. You can’t accurately predict how someone will act in any given situation unless you know their full situation and their personality, but that’s also why you can orchestrate any event you want in your story. The thing is, you can’t have a character act a certain way just once for no apparent reason.
If you’ve never watched Call The Midwife, you should know that Sister Evangelina is a practical, no-nonsense curmudgeon who’s not afraid to voice her opinion and tell people off when they’re not living up to her standards. She still has a soft spot for the younger midwives, though, especially when they’ve been dragged through hell trying to do the right thing. It’s NOT out of character for her to be kind when the situation warrants it, but she does do it her own way, which usually means running a bath for an exhausted midwife or making sure they’ve had enough to eat.
If Sister Evangelina told someone they should reward themselves by going shopping, that certainly would be out of character unless she was being sarcastic, so although characters are more than just one thing, there’s still some kind of a limit to what is believable and likely.
It’s so much easier to make your characters act “in character” when you know and understand them fully, which is why you might need the Ultimate Character Workbook.
You don’t need to understand psychology to write good characters
A while ago, someone left me a comment saying they use AI to make sure their stories make sense “based on what we know about psychology today”, which is probably in the top 5 of silliest comments I’ve ever received. Psychology isn’t some kind of a magic science that can accurately predict how people will behave, and if this person had asked an actual psychologist and not AI, they would know that already.
In real life, there are so many variables to why people do what they do, and the only thing that can SOMEWHAT predict a person’s actions is their personality, and even then it’s only over a longer period of time. That’s why an introvert can enjoy hanging out with people, for example, because nobody is just one thing all the time.
This isn’t just my personal opinion because I asked a real psychologist. You’re welcome!
You can make your characters do anything in your story as long as you have a reason for it and you set it up the right way. You can make someone devastated after winning the lottery and be excited about having been left at the altar. If you want to understand how people might act in situations that you’ve never personally experienced, why not read about it first? For example, Reddit is such a treasure trove of people sharing all kinds of life stories, but memoirs and magazine articles are good for research, too.
Don’t let your setting create a plot hole
Sometimes a plot hole happens when the writer doesn’t take into consideration what’s possible or likely in their setting. If it’s a fantasy setting or something else made-up, you could make anything happen, but you need to establish those facts first.
If you’ve got a dragon teleporting to the battle field at the last minute, giving your hero a chance to slay the corrupted king, then you’d better be showing beforehand that dragons teleporting is a possibility. If your space demon hunters can travel to the past through a plot hole wormhole, thus saving their own lives at the last minute, you should, in the very least, have someone speculate that it’s possible before it happens.
Do your research about the real world
If your story is set in the real world, you might have some research to do, especially if it’s taking place in the past or in a country that you’re not 100% familiar with.
For example, if you were an American person writing a story about Finland, it would be a pretty big plot hole if your character went into debt because they needed emergency surgery. That’s just not a thing here. And if you were writing about London in the 1700s and your characters ended up to the other side of the country in one day, that would also be a pretty significant plot hole because they didn’t have trains yet and horses are much slower.
If you’re unsure of your research or you simply don’t want to do very much of it, don’t make any significant plot events depend on the physical setting or the culture of that country or that era. That way you might still have inaccuracies, but at least they don’t lead to plot holes.
Remember the inner logic of your plot
I’m sorry if “inner logic” sounds unnecessarily complex, but I didn’t know how else to put it. There are two specific things I want to talk about: set-ups & pay-offs, and cause & effect. Those two pairs are a writer’s best friend.
Set-ups and pay-offs
You’ve probably already heard of Chekhov’s gun, meaning that if a gun appears in your story, it better get shot. Apparently it was originally about making sure all the elements in your story have a purpose, but it works for plotting, too. Make sure all the guns in your story get shot and that all the shots in your story come from loaded guns.
This matters because sometimes a plot hole is a set-up without a pay-off, or as is more likely, a pay-off without a set-up. Don’t make your reader’s say “What happened to the gun?” or “Wait, where did the gun come from?”
Things often escalate in stories, but for that to be possible, they need to start from somewhere. You need to show the potential as early as you can. If a character is going to snap and shoot their neighbour, you need to show them snapping in a smaller scale earlier on, you need to show them doing something else for the same reason that they’re shooting the neighbour for (or show them change as a person so that this new development is logical) and you need to make it obvious they’d have access to a gun.
An example of setting up your plot events
Let’s see how this works in practice.
For example, Susan is always bickering with her neighbour about boundaries and respectful behaviour because the neighbour is noisy and his pets are always on Susan’s yard. She has to deal with this on her own because her husband goes hunting for rabbits and other small game on a regular basis. In the beginning of the story, we also see Susan slip a lacy thong in her sleazy coworker’s car so that he’ll get in trouble with his wife, and later that day we see Susan yell at people in traffic because they’re being too slow.
We’ve now seen these things:
- Susan has a reason to dislike her neighbour
- She is home alone a lot
- She has access to guns (this is very heavily implied so you might not even need to mention the guns)
- She’s capable of doing questionable things when she thinks people aren’t acting right
- She’s probably got some anger issues
With this in mind, it makes perfect sense when later on in the story, Susan takes one of her husband’s guns and shoots the neighbour’s pet rabbit, leaving it on his porch to make a proper statement.
Cause and effect
Everything in life has a cause and an effect, and so it should be in stories. When anything happens, what made it happen? What made it possible? And then afterwards, what happens next? What are the consequences?
In our previous example, Susan had a reason to shoot the rabbit: she had long-time grudges for her neighbour and his behaviour. But what about the effects of what happened? You can pretty confidently say you have a plot hole if there are no consequences to Susan’s drastic actions – ones that actually make sense within your story.
Remember, you’re the architect of your story. Will the neighbour call the police? Will he move? Will he retaliate? Whatever happens next, make sure there’s a cause and a set-up. We need to have learned something about the neighbour that makes the reaction seem logical, especially if it’s something equally drastic that most people wouldn’t do.
How to get out of a plot hole in your story
When it comes to fixing your plot holes, you first need to know why the plot hole is there to begin with. Did you not consider something? Or did you simply forget to mention it? You knowing Susan’s husband is a hunter and has guns isn’t enough if you never mention it.
If you neglected to consider something, fixing it might force you to make bigger changes to your story if it’s something significant. But what should you change? Is it even worth it? Here are your options:
- Change the plot event to something that isn’t incompatible with the rest of the story or make adjustments to the plot event
- Make changes to your character (the character itself or to their past) so that it makes sense the plot event would happen to them or they would make it happen themselves
- Make changes to your story world, as in your setting or past events, so that it makes sense the plot event would happen the way that it did
Let’s talk about Susan again, because clearly she’s an interesting character. (You don’t need to agree with her actions but at least we can explain them!) She shoots the neighbour’s rabbit, but we don’t actually know why she’d have access to a gun. What are our options here?
- Forget the shooting and make Susan kidnap the rabbit and take her to a local park (change the plot event)
- Give Susan a reason to have the gun, like a hunter husband or a job at a sketchy pawn shop (change the character)
- Make the neighbourhood bad and mention that everyone sleeps with a gun under their pillow (change the setting) or show us Susan shooting a seagull that annoys her in the beginning of the story (change past events)
As you can see, there are many things you can change or adjust, so you don’t need to fall into despair when you’ve found a plot hole.
How to fix character change plot holes
Your characters will change over the course of your story, just like how real people learn new things and become more something and a little less something else. Usually characters change “for the better”, which doesn’t necessarily mean they become morally good, just that they stop being stupid about something specific or become a better fit to their environment. Sometimes that could mean becoming more evil if that’s what serves them better.
The person that your character is in the beginning can’t be the same person they are at the end. Why? Because that person hadn’t yet solved the problem. As Einstein (allegedly?) said, you can’t solve problems with the same mindset that created them.
However, knowing what kind of change happens is just first part of the equation. You also need to know what makes that change happen and show evidence of it as it’s happening. As in, you need to have the right plot events that cause the change, but you also need to remember people don’t change in one fell swoop.
Let’s say you have a dog lover who despises cats (loser behaviour in my opinion, but let’s go with it anyway), and solving her Big Problem requires becoming close friends with a cat. No, I don’t know why, but this is the example I’m using here anyway. Here’s what you might need to do:
- Show in the beginning that although she loves dogs and hates cats, she’s capable of becoming cat-friendly in the end. Treating all animals with respect would definitely leave a door open for cats, too.
- She’s forced to deal with cats for some reason, and we see she’s really struggling with this. She’s always full of scratches and bite marks because cats don’t trust her either.
- She sees someone dump a litter of kittens into a trash can and she’s appalled, but for now, she does nothing.
- One day she’s having a very bad day and she goes lie down on the floor in despair, and finally a cat approaches her nicely, curling up to her and purring. She realises she’s been approaching cats like dogs, and understandably it hasn’t worked. Maybe there’s a parallel to her personal problems, too.
- The next time she sees someone mistreat cats, she throws soiled kitty litter on their face.
- She has finally learned that she can only befriend a cat by letting a cat choose her, and she has new-found respect for cats AND for her own boundaries.
You can make a bullet point list like this of your own story to make sure you’ve got enough character-changing events and that you’re showing instances of the change happening.
Logical doesn’t mean predictable
A person who’s never properly analysed stories and hasn’t much thought about this stuff might complain that if they do this, it makes their story predictable. What a strange thing to say!
Look at any story you’ve read or movie you’ve watched where something surprising happened. Go re-read it or re-watch it. Did the surprising event REALLY come out of nowhere? Or did it make perfect sense in hindsight?
The best stories are surprising but inevitable. If you don’t know how to make that happen, don’t blame stories or your readers, but keep working at it and keep reading other people’s stories with a discerning eye. I talk about this in the 12-ish things you need to stop doing video, but people really need to stop resisting learning new things when it’s something that they can’t figure out at once. Writing great stories is absolutely worth it.
The Plot Without Holes workbook makes this simple
I’m genuinely obsessed with helping people with their plots, so I didn’t want to settle for just writing a blog post, I also made you a workbook that helps you write a story with zero plot holes.
Plot Without Holes workbook has so many questions about your story that help you make it make sense, and you learn so much more about plotting. You also get a video where I go through the entire workbook for you, explaining why every question matters and give you more context.
Now that you know how to write a plot that works, you’ll never find yourself in a situation again where you’ve dug yourself into a hole you can’t get out of. That’ll help you write stories that your readers can’t stop reading.
Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.
