Writing – The Craft of

Plot Holes

/ Lisa / Leave a comment

We watched Interstellar last night. Long movie – almost three hours. And there was a huge plot hole in the middle.

In the movie, the heroes travel through a worm hole to save the earth. They are headed to two stations where previous heroes went to see if places were habitable. One station has quit transmitting and the other has been transmitting regularly that the place is livable. So our heroes go there, having adventures along the way and losing one crew member. All good so far.

When the heroes arrive, they are met by the lone survivor of the earlier trip. This station is a world so frozen that even the clouds are ice. But the survivor tells them how the place is livable in a lower level so they start unloading all their stuff. However, he turns out to be the Villain who attacks the leader then steals their ship in order to get home because he’s lied and the station isn’t habitable after all.

So the Villain is desperate to get home. Understandable. But here’s the giant plot hole. All he would have had to do is tell them the place wasn’t habitable when they arrived. They would have loaded him up and moved on to the next station, or tried to go home. There’s a twist with going home, but that’s not relevant here and I don’t want to list too many spoilers. There was absolutely no reason for all the storyline maneuvering, the attacks, stealing the ship and all that drama. I mean, the heroes wouldn’t even have had the excuse that they couldn’t save the Villain because they would be over a weight limit on their ship since they lost a crew member earlier. And the Villain is an experienced pilot which they could have used.

In other words, no believable reason for the Villain to be a villain.

I lost interest at about that point.

It’s the same with books. A reader might let one, or maybe two, coincidences slip by. Maybe they’ll allow one instance where the point of view character does something that has no ties to the plot threads. But more than that and the reader will move on and probably never pick up something by that author again.

It reminds me of a book I read a long time ago about a knight on horseback who turns to his trusty companion and says ‘No shit, Sherlock’. Seriously. And that was only one of many such dialog issues. Oddly the author is well known and has a lot of books out with this same knight. He’s one busy dude, slinging contemporary slang as easily as his sword.

Anyway, if the action sequence raises questions because the route taken makes no sense, the author better insert a compelling reason that ties character and plot together. Otherwise the audience is going to move on.

Writing Sounds

/ Lisa / Leave a comment

Remember that hilarious video of two men talking, but the only word they say is ‘Dude’? The different inflections tell the listener what they are talking about.

But how does that translate to writing?

If that conversation were to be written, punctuation would help.

“Dude!”

“Dude?”

Then there are dialog tags. “Dude,” he said, on a long exhalation of beer-infused breath.

The idea intrigues me. I’m positive I miss opportunities by not thinking about the sound of a story. I don’t mean reading your work out loud, which is of course important. I mean, how do you convey sound without being bland (‘the car door slammed’) or corny (POW!!! Batman’s fist hit Robin’s jaw)?

If you do an internet search on writing sounds, you get some interesting hits. I found a few sites that actually had sounds attached to writing, where someone had done studies and assigned sounds to things like a pencil on paper.

I got distracted by that one.

Then there’s Onomatopoeia. At its most basic that means using sound to show the noise, as in hiss, meow, or POW!!! There’s a more subtle version of this where the word alludes to sound. Like Eeyore’s name in Winnie the Pooh. His name is a quiet nod to the sound a donkey makes. Think about that honking, braying sound. Can’t you hear ‘Eeeeeyooorrreee’ in there?

I got distracted reading up on Onomatopoeia, too.

With all the internet searching though, I didn’t really find what I was looking for. How do you imply sound through words, without telling the reader what something sounds like?

Well, body language works. Someone speaks and the other person cringes and covers their ears.

Description, of course, implies sound. If I said ‘fingernails on a blackboard’ you’d hear that sound. I think, though, that using that tool can cause writing to slide into clichés. And one can’t forget that too much description gets boring. Plus, description means you’re writing what you see, rather than what you hear, if that makes sense.

I’ve tried closing my eyes to eliminate the sense of sight and forcing myself to focus on just sounds. As I listened, I tried to figure out how I would translate sound into words.

I got queasy.

So I don’t know. Guess I’ll just keep using a mix of all of the above, hoping that somehow the reader, using imagination, can hear the wind in the trees or the scary sounds outside the door late at night.

Boring Words

/ Lisa / 4 Comments

I’ve started a stand-alone book not connected to the mystery series, with multiple point of view characters.

Last night I worked on the beginning scene with one of those characters. Several months ago I wrote opening scenes with this character that I liked a lot. Jumping right into the action. But then I realized I needed to back up and introduce the opening scenes.

Words flowed just great last night. Fingers flying on the keyboard. Until I realized the fingers weren’t flying, they were skimming. And I was yawning.

You know what? If you’re bored with the story when you’re writing it, the readers sure aren’t going to be thrilled while reading.

I went to bed.

The problem is obvious. In this scene I have a teacher with a mysterious background, and eight students heading out on a field trip in the mountains. The original beginning started in the middle of dramatic action. This version I wanted to set the stage for that action. What made it so boring was not realizing that setting the stage means just moving a few pieces in. You don’t necessarily have to bring in every tiny piece of stage decoration.

In other words, I was introducing each person and trying to feed in a little of who each person was. Description, a bit of their personality quirks, a little dialog, some of the teacher’s opinions on each of them. I know better than to throw in all the backstory at once, but even this amount of information was too much.

Part of this obvious problem is the number of characters in the opening scene. I wanted to set the names of each before the reader, to plant those names preparing for the coming action. But nine characters in the opening scene, with an introduction on each of them, turned into a boring information dump, even though I salted it with dialog and movement. Especially when only a few are going to be pivotal to the story. (Teaser: the rest are needed to provide bodies…)

So tonight I’m going back and deleting most of what I wrote last night. The opening will be replaced with introduction, description, etc., on, at the most, the teacher and two or three students. And even that may be too much. The remaining students can have attention drawn to them through something as simple as the teacher thinking about taking eight kids into the woods. That’s sufficient to tell the reader there are more kids on scene. And then as the story unfolds, as the action begins, each of those eight will play their parts.

Years ago I would have struggled much longer to make the story work. I would have ignored the inner critic yawning loudly. I would have ignored the inner critic finally yelling ‘BORING!!!!’ and kept writing. I would have told myself that if I plowed ahead, things would improve.

Now, a little wiser, I’m more ruthless. If it’s not working it’s time to cut and toss. If I’m bored I need to go back to the point where I started losing interest, cut everything from that point forward, and start over.

It never pays in the long run to force a story where it doesn’t want to go. The detour takes way too much effort and sometimes you never find your way back to where the story needs to be. I’ve learned to listen to my instinct and to not be afraid to trust that feeling. And this time it only took me a day to figure out the problem instead of weeks of writing and fighting it, and then more weeks of figuring out how to fix the problem.

But man, last night? That was some of the most awful, boring writing I’ve done in a very long time. Let’s blame the heat, shall we?

In the meantime I need to go to the beginning I liked. I think there will be a way to add in what I tried to do last night, in a much tighter way. I probably don’t need as much stage setting as I thought I did.

Maybe I’ll be holding my breath as I madly type, instead of yawning.