Category Archives: plot holes

How to Spot and Plug Plot Holes

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Caution! Plot holes!

Nothing yanks me out of a story faster than a plot hole. If they’re really stupid, I get mad. And I quit reading or watching. That disconnect doesn’t just “break immersion”, it breaks trust, and it quietly murders your relationship with your reader/viewer.

Plot holes can happen anywhere, but they’re most common in mysteries, thrillers, and action stories, where the engine of the story is cause-and-effect.

At their core, plot holes are logic problems with motives, chronology, and missions.

Motives for Heroes

When readers say, “I don’t buy it,” they’re usually talking about motive.

  • Does what your hero wants make sense?
  • Do your hero’s actions make sense and connect with his motive?

Extra Plot-Hole Patrol Tip: Make sure the hero’s motive isn’t just logical, but urgent. If the hero can shrug and go get tacos, your plot is in trouble. Stakes are the duct tape that keeps decisions from wobbling.

Motives for Villains

Villains are plot-hole factories when their plans are vague, inconsistent, or powered by “because the writer needed it.”

  • Do we understand why he’s doing what he’s doing?
  • Do we understand what the bad guy’s plan is?

Extra Tip: “I’m evil” is not a plan. Even chaotic villains have an internal logic: a need, a wound, a belief, a fear, or a payoff. If the villain’s motive changes scene to scene, the audience notices.

Chronology

Chronology is where stories accidentally teleport.

Make sure that your characters are doing the things they need to do in the right order. Don’t have them break into the Art Museum before they’ve learned how to disarm the alarm system.

Extra Tip: Time is sneaky. If your story has travel, deadlines, injuries, weather, or “we only have six hours,” do a quick sanity check: How long would this actually take? If your character drives across town in three minutes during rush hour, you will lose your readers.

Missions

This is the “what are we doing and how are we doing it?” category. Mission confusion creates plot holes because the audience can’t track what should logically happen next.

  • Is your good guys’ plan clear?
  • What are they going after?
  • How are they going to do it?
  • And what do they need to do it?
  • How are the bad guys going to counter the hero’s actions?
  • Does the villain have a logical reaction to the hero’s successes?
  • Does the hero have a logical reaction to the villain’s roadblocks?

Extra Tip: Track resources like a hawk. Weapons, money, passwords, keys, vehicles, evidence, magic rules, phone battery, injury level, allies who know the plan. A shocking number of plot holes are really just “Wait…where did that come from?” problems.

Here are Three Ways to Avoid Logic Breaks

1. The Villain’s Timeline

From The Villain’s Journey by Debbie Burke, even when he is off camera, track what the villain is doing in every scene to stymie the hero.

2. The Villain’s Plan

Create a step-by-step plan for the villain’s goal. Each step should happen in your story, even if some of them are off camera.

Picture the villain with their own off-screen Netflix series running parallel to your story. What scenes are happening that we don’t see? Who are they calling, bribing, stalking, moving, framing, sabotaging?

A helpful test: if you can’t summarize the villain’s plan in 3 to 7 steps, it’s probably not clear enough in your head yet, which means it definitely won’t be clear on the page.

3. The Hero’s Knowledge and Logic Check

Go through each scene and ask: what does the hero know here about what the villain is doing? Based on what he knows, what is his next logical step?

Extra Idea: Do this for the reader, too. What does the reader know at this moment? What are you inviting them to assume? A lot of plot holes are really “the author forgot what they told the audience” holes.

A Few More Plot Hole Plugs

The “Because/Therefore” Chain

For every major beat: this happens because of that, and therefore this next thing happens. If you find yourself writing “and then,” pause. “And then” is where plot holes breed like rabbits.

The Reverse Outline

After you draft, create a scene-by-scene outline of what actually happens. You’ll instantly spot missing steps, logic leaps, and scenes that depend on information nobody has yet.

The Continuity Bible

Especially for series, thrillers, and anything with big conspiracies: keep a simple master doc for names, dates, rules, injuries, secrets, locations, and “who knows what when.”

Eyes on the Story

And finally, the best defense against plot holes and logic problems is another pair of eyes. Have trusted writer friends, story coaches, and editors read your book or script and give you feedback. Ask your readers to track your plot and make sure it makes sense.

Because here’s the truth: you can’t always see your own plot holes. You built the whole world. You know what you meant. Your reader only knows what’s on the page, and they will notice when your story skips a beat.

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Have Gun? Won’t Travel.

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Films and TV shows have been getting grittier and more nuanced in the last decade. Even superhero films like The Dark Knight have taken the plunge. Campiness is over. We want to feel like what we’re watching could really happen. However, in many of these stories, there are plot holes both minor and major that are glossed over by viewers and critics alike. I understand what a challenge it can be to balance the realism with storytelling momentum. The question is, when does it reaching the breaking point?

I don’t have a problem with unlikely events or million-to-one chance occurrences. Those can actually happen. Just look at Captain Sullenberger’s miracle landing on the Hudson. I’m talking about more mundane and prosaic details that don’t fit in the real world as we understand it. As an author I spend a lot of time thinking how important it is to maintain realism in thrillers.

Adhering to realism may be less a problem if you’re writing a mystery or police procedural. I don’t think Michael Connelly has any trouble keeping the story elements close to what detectives actually do for their jobs. But I write big adventures with huge action set pieces and world-threatening stakes. I strive to keep my plots in the realm of plausibility, though the combination of events would be extremely unlikely. To me, that’s what makes a story worth telling: a scenario that would almost never happen.

Yet I still want to believe the story—that if these people were thrust into this situation, it might actually turn out the way the story is told. That’s true whether I’m the creator or consumer of the tale. It should feel real.

Realism for its own sake, however, can be super boring. Shows like CSI, NCIS, and Castle would take forever if the police had to wait for DNA testing to come back in the amount of time it takes in the real world (months) instead of TV time (hours). On TV, captains get impatient if it takes more than two days to bring in the killer, but in the real world it can take weeks or months to gather enough evidence to make an arrest, if they ever do. And the DNA evidence on TV is always exact and decisive, to the point that actual prosecutors now have to routinely remind juries that such evidence is rarely definitive. Many viewers don’t understand that we simply accept these unrealistic accelerated timetables so that we can get to the good parts of the story.

The blockbuster action-adventure movies seem to get away with bigger plot hand-waving. You won’t find a bigger James Bond fan than I am, but I’m perplexed that for fifty years Bond has flown around the world with his trusty Walther PPK pistol. How? It’s never explained why he can breeze through airport security carrying a loaded weapon in his luggage. Is it plastic? Does he have diplomatic immunity? Does he pay off the TSA agents? Never mind that he’s a member of the British Secret Service who tells just about everyone he meets what his real name is. The real secret is how he isn’t nabbed by authorities the minute he gets off the plane.

In The Dark Knight,the Joker stuffs two ferries with hundreds of drums of explosives. When did he find time for that? How did the crew overlook them? And how does the Joker roam around Gotham City with that hideous makeup on and no one ever notices him?

In Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt finds a large cache of weapons and technology in a railcar outside of Moscow. Every law enforcement agency on the planet is looking for him and his team for blowing up the Kremlin, yet he shows up in Dubai a day later with the full load of guns and ammo in a hotel suite. The audience is just expected to accept that Hunt has a way to smuggle all of that contraband thousands of miles while on the run from the authorities.

I wonder whether novels are held to a higher standard than other media when it comes to suspension of disbelief. I don’t think a novelist could get away with those kinds of plot holes without being called on them by readers. I think the difference is in how the media are consumed. When you’re watching a movie, it doesn’t give you time to think about the plot holes until it’s finished, and by then you’ve already formed your opinion about whether or not you liked it. But it takes six to ten hours or more to read a book, sometimes over the course of weeks. The reader has plenty of time to think about potential plot holes, and if they’re glaring they may even make the reader put the book down for good. On the other hand, a movie has to be pretty bad for me to stop watching halfway through (I’m looking at you, Batman and Robin).

The acceptance of plot holes may also have to do with how we use our imaginations in the different media. With TV and movies, the visuals and sounds are supplied for you in a constant stream, and we accept them as the reality of the story. However, with novels we generate all of the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes in our minds. Creating all of them from scratch requires effort on our part, and if they don’t fit into the logic of the story, it becomes much more noticeable. Would Raiders of the Lost Ark have been able to convince readers that Indiana Jones rode on top of a submarine for two days to that island where the Ark was taken if it were a book? In the movie we see a diving montage and a map sequence showing a 500-mile trip, but due to selective editing Indy is ready to beat up Nazis as soon as they come into port—starvation, thirst, and hypothermia be damned (not to mention holding his breath for two days).

Without those quick cuts in a novel, readers would have the time and imagination to realize Indy isn’t Aquaman. That’s why I put plenty of thought into potential plot holes. I may not eliminate all of them, but I try to make them as tiny as possible. The process takes up a good chunk of my writing time, and my beta readers still bring many to my attention. So if you’re a writer, I highly recommend that you have a few people read through your book as a logic consultant. You may be surprised at how many plot holes they find that you thought you’d plugged.