 For Authors: April 14, 2021 Issue [#10706] |
This week: Plot Holes Begone! Edited by: NaNoNette  
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Dear Authors, I am NaNoNette and I will be your guest editor for today's edition.
When you are just starting out as a novelist and you're trying to grow a readership, the worst thing that can happen is to lose the reader's interest. One mistake that can drive readers away are plot holes. Let's discuss how to avoid those and keep your readers turning the pages. |
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Plot Holes Begone!
Time and place and scene setting.
Start as late as possible into a scene. Your readers don't need a whole lot of exposition. Even the middle of a conversation can be early enough if that conversation advances the plot. Make sure there is new information for the reader.
Describe as much as needed to make your scene work, but don't bog the reader down with details that have no bearing on the outcome of the story. Focus the descriptions on those aspects that add context to the plot or character development. For instance, nobody needs to know what color the couch is, unless it is a color that helps to conceal spilled blood. Bookshelves are a great way to give some information about a character. Is he way too interested in true crime stories? Is he reading anatomical books although he is a banker? Why does he need to know where best to poke a corpse to make it sink deep into a river?
Give your characters time to react.
You have a great story in your head. It's rushing onto to the page like a river during the snowmelt. Your character sits on a raft with a stoic face. Really?
If something happens, make it count by showing your protagonist's reaction. For instance, if a minor character dies, you can't just move on to the next scene. There has to be a payoff through a reaction from your main character.
If there is a cataclysmic event that kills off a large number of non-player characters, it's okay if your protagonist takes the time to run for cover. Before you move on from that scene, have her feel shocked, afraid, or otherwise aggrieved about the situation. A good one is always survivor's guilt.
Every cause must have an effect.
Each time you drop a nugget of knowledge into the story, there has to be a payoff for it. If you were to plant a bunch of seeds all around your garden, you would see something grow, or nothing grow. Each time you plant a plot seed, it has to either visibly grow or visibly die. Don't waste those seeds. The planted seeds that neither grow nor die will confuse your readers.
If your story calls for a certain bit of descriptive detail, make sure that your reader can understand how this detail got there and what it does.
For characters development, it would be believable if someone who grows up rich to be smug and arrogant. If a poor character is going to behave like that, explain why he is acting against an expected character trait for rich people.
Weave your plot web around the details and the characters in a harmonious way so that each event and each action has a logic origin for your reader.
Character growth has to be believable.
Did not hear it here first: Your main character should evolve and be changed in some way at the end of the story.
Enable your readers to understand first who your character is at the beginning, have her go through her trials and let your reader travel along as her experiences change her.
It is simply not believable if your protagonist starts out as an innocent teen and ends up a cold-blooded assassin if we don't see which events tie the beginning point to the end point of her evolution.
For every change your character goes through, you have to be able to answer the question: why?
Make your reader care.
If you plan to kill a character, you must make the readers like or hate that character first. If someone walks on just to be killed, the reader will not care and wonder why this information is here.
Even if your story's focus is the murderer, if he simply goes around and randomly kills characters that the reader never saw, he will put the book down and you lost him for good. We all sang ten little monkeys, we don't need it in book form. Unless those lost lives mean something.
If you plan on having anyone die in your plot, give them at minimum a cookie cutter personality. Even killing a stock character has to come with a reason and make me feel something about the main character.
As you self-edit your novel or short story, be on the lookout for these elements.
As a reviewer, help a writer out and let her know when she just killed someone whom you didn't care for. Let her know if that piece of furniture is pointless. And do please also point out when you could see the cause and the effect and when those characters got your blood boiling. Let the writer know they made you feel something. |
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Replies to my last For Authors newsletter "Read the Tea Leaves" question: Which one of your prophecies came true, but worse?
Quick-Quill  wrote: It's all in the drink. "Coffee Anyone?"
hbk16 wrote: It is a featured issue indeed. Predicting the future has always been the human being's dream. Many authors have predicted the ftre indeed and it becomes true later.
Big issue indeed!
Kåre เลียม Enga  wrote: I'm not a great risk taker. I dislike Chaos. When the Lord of Chaos won ... I was in tears ... but there was some Hope. Silly me ... my first forecast of Cataclysmic Storms was correct ... but much much worse.
jolanh  wrote: None of my prophecies came true. In my defense most of them were tomato related and involved selling $20 ketchup bottles
ruwth  wrote: An odd thing happened to me in 2009. I had a calendar and had pre-marked my paydays on it for several months—several months but for some reason, not through the end of the year. I became disabled that year. Oddly, I got my last paycheck on the last payday I had marked...
What are the odds of that?
TheBusmanPoet  wrote: I don't believe in prophecies. I believe in real life.
kevint wrote: That would be the one I received back in the stone-age before anyone ever even heard of the internet or home PC’s Cell Phones, Pads ect. When peoples You Tube was their collection of vinyl and eight track tapes. Which basically involved the recent Presidential Election coup and Hijacking of the airwaves, Big tech, and media censorship of conservatives. Along with the development of them new cutting-edge high tech mini behavioral modification neural micro-chip implants. Some of the Obama Care money was funding the building of them. As of yet though (at least to the best of my knowledge) they have not started secretly implanting our children without our knowledge and or consent. But that will be coming I would imagine.
I should have probably kept it to myself as I was told but didn’t and the punishment was being locked up in mental institutions and medicated off and on for years (absolutely insane and bazaar true story) which will unfold in my portfolio book “The Quest of Jillian Chilligan” that I recently started working on.
s wrote: I made a joke prophesy in high school (the 1980s) about something happening in the 2000s... and it pretty much has come to pass and it is terrible.
What was it? Because of recent abuse from the WdC community because of a certain type of intolerance that is becoming more and more prevalent here, I will not say. The abuse is appalling.
Nobody should abuse you. We are all entitled to our opinions. Dissent and discussion and debate is healthy. Abuse is disgusting. I am sorry that you are experiencing it here on Writing.Com where we should all feel safe with one another. Virtual 
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