Writing a book comes with many complicated aspects but one of the most important things in the writing process is ensuring that your plot is well-written and developed properly. An angle of ensuring that this happens is to watch out for the idea of plot holes. Plot holes can hurt a story’s credibility and make readers feel confused and possibly even question the writer’s abilities and skills. So, for today’s post, I’ll be talking about how you can avoid plot holes when you go to write a book.
What Are Plot Holes?
Plot holes are basically gaps and inconsistencies in the narrative of the story that form contradictions to whatever logic has been established by your story before. In addition to this, plot holes can be things like unexplained events. By this, I mean that there are certain things that happen that seem like they need an explanation or require an explanation but are never given any, leaving it open-ended with no resolution. Even if you’re writing a series, you can clear up plot holes in later books, but never clearing them up is noticeable.
Plot holes can also be things like character inconsistencies where they act in ways that contradict their previously established motivations, abilities, or knowledge. They can also be timeline problems. There may be things like a discrepancy in the sequence of events, which may cause confusion in readers if it’s not cleared up when a certain event happened. Unless this is part of your story, like if you have an unreliable narrator that is equally unaware of what’s actually happening and when.
How to Avoid Plot Holes in Your Writing
Outline the Story
One of the best ways to avoid plot holes is to create an outline of your story. An outline should include things like the timeline of the book in chronological order, the major events that will be happening in the story, your character’s arc, and more relevant details.
If you want to learn how to outline a plot for a book, check this post out.
Additionally, you can create chapter summaries and character profiles to help you figure out what’s supposed to be happening, who your characters are, and more. If you want to learn how to create a character profile, check this post out.
If you want to see more about why I recommend outlining your book before your first draft, check out this post.
Keep the World Building Consistent
World building is a major part of avoiding plot holes in a book because you need to have a solid understanding of how the world in your story works, what the rules of this world are, and more. If you have a fantasy magic system, then you need to understand what its limitations and consequences are more than just how it works. Additionally, you want to use these things in a consistent, logical manner.
This is why keeping track of your world building is a super important part of the writing process as well. I’ve spoken about different ways to keep track of world building before using digital tools and also using physical tools, so you can go and check those posts out.
What you want to ensure that you know are the rules of your world and to keep these rules and conditions consistent and proper so that it makes sense to your readers. If you want help learning how to world build, check out this starter guide.
Utilize Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing can help avoid plot holes because it builds up something that initially may not make sense, but because it was used as a tool to explain something later, it can help you dodge the issue of inconsistency.
The things you introduce can have relevance to the plot by being tools for foreshadowing and it can also help enhance your narrative in general. If you want to learn more about proper foreshadowing, check out this post.
Keep Characters Consistent
Another big thing that you need to ensure so that you can avoid any potential plot holes is to keep your characters consistent. One of the issues I see sometimes is that characters will suddenly act outside of their personality that has been established for an entire book simply to service the plot. Unless you’ve introduced to the reader that this character’s actions can sometimes fall under nuance, you can’t really do this.
One way you can ensure consistency is to understand your characters by having a character profile but also to keep track of your character arcs and to track their development and growth across a book. Characters should develop if they are important to the story, but you don’t want to make it a crazy development that has no grounding in your story as this will create holes in the plot.
Manage Your Timeline
The timeline of your story is something that you should be constantly keeping track of. As you write your chapters, if you didn’t already outline them before writing, write up a quick summary of the most important events in the chapter and understand the timeline of your story. You want to ensure that the events are occurring in an order that’s logical and makes sense in the ultimate scheme of things.
In addition to this, you want to make sure that the pacing of your story is balanced and makes sense. You want to have slow scenes and fast scenes to keep the story actually engaging but to also have the plot make sense and feel coherent to readers so that they’re not just skipping over entire chapters.
Enlist the Help of Beta Readers
One way you can avoid plot holes is to sometimes step away from your work and hand it over to someone else to give a read. That’s why I recommend you try and seek beta readers to help you out. Beta readers can check your manuscript and identify issues where there may be potential plot holes, thus potentially pointing out to you something that you initially may not have seen before in your story.
Ensure You’re Editing and Revising
One of the biggest things with seeing plot holes in your story is to constantly ensure that you’re editing and revising. You will likely need to rewrite scenes or chapters and potentially even rewrite sections of the book in general, leading to multiple drafts. This is fine and helps you to avoid issues with your plot.
Furthermore, editing helps you see things in a different perspective. You may want to also hire an editor if you feel like you’re not going to be able to accurately check your story at some point in time.
Keep Track of Subplots
If you have many subplots in your story, especially if you’re writing a longer sort of book, then you’ll want to keep track of those subplots. Outlining your plot and writing out your subplots and outlining those individual subplots can help you because you’ll be able to see precisely what’s going to be happening and when it’ll be happening in your story. Keeping track also allows you to avoid any plot holes because you’ve basically got a sort of list to keep checking to make sure that everything is going according to your plans.
Use Notebooks or Software to Track Your Writing
If you’re like me, you probably want to have a way to actually keep track of what you’ve written, what your story is like, what sort of lore is required for your story, and more. That’s why I personally use notebooks to keep track of a lot of information, and I’ve made a post about great notebooks to give you writing inspo. However, there’s also online tools and software that’s really helpful as well. I’ve got these blog posts to help you with this part:
- The Top Ten Best Worldbuilding Tools (Paid and FREE)
- The Best Notebooks for Keeping Track of World Building
- Top Ten BEST Writing Software for Authors in 2024
- Is World Anvil Good for World Building?: A Review
Re-Read Consistently to Check for Issues
Aside from editing and reviewing your story, you also need to keep re-reading consistently to check for issues with your story. I actually do this all the time as part of my writing process and I find that it’s really helpful and important when I’m writing to do this.
What I usually do is that I’ll sometimes start my writing session by going back a couple of chapters, reading what happened, refreshing my memory, and then I’ll get to the writing of my new chapter for the day. This is sometimes time consuming, so I don’t always do this, but it’s nice to get a bit of a refresher on what happened before your current chapter in case you forgot a few details or something.
Avoid Deus Ex Machina
Deus Ex Machina is a phenomenon that occurs in storytelling when the conflict is resolved by some unexpected power or event that otherwise would not have existed in the context of the story and feels very last-second.
Introducing new elements and Deus Ex Machina can hurt your plot because it can raise questions about why certain things in the story even had to happen, thus leading to issues with the believability of your plot in the first place.
Conclusion
Plot holes can be very impactful when it comes to the quality of a story that you’re writing. By undertaking behaviors that help to actively avoid plot holes, you can ensure that your story stays consistent and has an engaging narrative behind it. Sometimes, it helps to get extra help from others even if you feel confident that you’ve avoided plot holes, so don’t be afraid to seek out help from beta readers or other similar groups.
Before you head on out, be sure to check out my series, The Fallen Age Saga, and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter to get updates on any of my latest posts, WIPs, book releases and more!