Hello dear readers, and welcome back to my month long countdown of some of my greatest fictional pet peeves. Already we've taken a good look at why I'm bugged by "perfect" characters (# 5), characters whose life revolves almost entirely around coincidence (# 4) and characters who refuse to evolve with their series (# 3), but today I'm going to focus on a pet peeve I like to call Plot Hoops.
So you've become invested in a story. It's well written, it has fun, likable characters, and you can't wait to see what happens next. You can tell they're building up to something big, that an awesome scene is right around the corner. Your enthusiasm builds, the story speeds up, and then suddenly... someone does something wildly out of character, possibly even incredibly stupid that makes absolutely no sense given everything you'd already seen.
Hey guys, I know there's a bunch of torture zombies outside right now, but I think we should split up.
There's probably a term for this type of literary problem, but I've always called them Plot Hoops. They're not quite plot holes, not really, because they don't always actively contradict past events and characterizations in the story, but they will always feel so out there, so off, that it feels like the characters may as well have been jumping through hoops for the sole purpose of moving the story along to the next big scene. And sure, while the scenes these plot hoops often lead to are entertaining and even the centerpieces of their respective works of art, they remain irritating and problematic and militantly cannot be ignored. I could go on listing every example I could think of...
Like flying down the Death Star's heavily armed trench instead of just flying directly at the thermal exhaust port?
Like pretty much everything involved with the Tri-Wizard Tournament and the resurrection of Voldemort?
Or pretty much any decision Janeway ever made? (Though truth be told, I know this one has more to do with a massive, disinterested writing team than anything else.)
...but that would just be scratching the surface of this problem, and, well, there are also too many examples to list in one article while still maintaining people's attention, so I'm just going to leave it at those few examples.
The cause of this problem is one of the easiest to point out and one of the most difficult to deal with: the outline. Most stories require an outline, whether a formal written one or a casual, rough idea of a plot, to get off the ground. And while I cannot speak for every writer in the world, I have to imagine the outlining process for most has to work a lot like this:
Step 1: Come up with some really cool/necessary scenes for the story's plot
Step 2: Put them in a good order
Step 3: Fill in the gaps
The cause of this problem is one of the easiest to point out and one of the most difficult to deal with: the outline. Most stories require an outline, whether a formal written one or a casual, rough idea of a plot, to get off the ground. And while I cannot speak for every writer in the world, I have to imagine the outlining process for most has to work a lot like this:
Step 1: Come up with some really cool/necessary scenes for the story's plot
Step 2: Put them in a good order
Step 3: Fill in the gaps
Step 4: Profit!
Step 1 is the easy part. Step 2 is often a little bit harder. It's Step 3 where this problem universally pops up. (Though like any good writer trying to make a living off of it, I'll admit that Step 4 is indeed the truly hard part.)
We all create stories with an eye on certain scenes that we think are particularly important for the story, yet these often come at the expense of the rest of the story. To see how this happens, let's make up a story. For the sake of argument, let's imagine that this story we're working on is an 80's slasher film.
We all create stories with an eye on certain scenes that we think are particularly important for the story, yet these often come at the expense of the rest of the story. To see how this happens, let's make up a story. For the sake of argument, let's imagine that this story we're working on is an 80's slasher film.
Oh, hi Jason!
Now being writers behind an 80's slasher movie, we know that the main scenes people come to see, and indeed generally write these movies around, are the death scenes. And because we enjoy squishy too, that's what we're going to focus on when outlining. So we think of a number of bizarre weapons to kill people with (knives, machetes, rubber chickens, the soundtrack of The Bodyguard (on vinyl), the moon's gravitational pull, a burlap sack containing the collected works of Leo Tolstoy...), and we get our death scenes. We attach them to our great list of stereotypical horror movie victims, and we've got... well, about 15% of a movie. There needs to be some filler. If you add some back story before the killing, great, then you get about 50% of a movie.
Which, like having only 50% of an actor, is rarely a good thing.
So now it's a matter of putting in that vital connective tissue between the death scenes and, well, here's where the problems come in. See, for most of these death scenes to work, we need characters to be on their own, which usually means they have to make some bad decisions.
The same kind of decisions that many actors think they made in doing horror before becoming famous.
No matter how smart or genre savvy the character has proven themselves to be throughout the movie, we need to remove their agency and have them make some truly baffling decisions in order to get them exactly where we need them to be, when they need to be there, so we can see just how much squishy we could squeeze out of them. Sure, maybe with a little thought we could maybe make their actions make some kind of sense, but that would take time, and work, and may interfere with our precious death by Tolstoy scene, and we can't have that now, can we? No, at times like this it's best to hurry through so we can finish the script and get to all the parties and drugs and groupies that horror film writers must have!
You're kidding, right?
So writers get lazy. We all do it, and sometimes these contrivances are the only things that can get us from one place to another. If we don't want people to constantly call us on these, though, we need to do two things:
1) Take care with the connective tissue! Don't hurry this part, ask if it makes sense, and please, please, please just make sure that you've done your best to make everything make sense in a way that won't have your readers say 'OH, COME ON!' more than five times per book.
2) Don't fall in love with your big scenes (too much). This one's the hardest, I know, because a certain amount of love is necessary to pull most of these off in the first place, but it's probably the most necessary. When you fall in love with a particular scene, you want to mold the entire story around it, but in the end you need to look at the story as a complete organism, not just a bunch of parts thrown together a la Frankenstein's monster, because just like Frankenstein's monster, if some of your story parts work better than others, it still stands a chance of derailing your entire story, going on a violent rampage that might end in a misunderstanding with a small girl drowning in a lake, which we can't have.
1) Take care with the connective tissue! Don't hurry this part, ask if it makes sense, and please, please, please just make sure that you've done your best to make everything make sense in a way that won't have your readers say 'OH, COME ON!' more than five times per book.
2) Don't fall in love with your big scenes (too much). This one's the hardest, I know, because a certain amount of love is necessary to pull most of these off in the first place, but it's probably the most necessary. When you fall in love with a particular scene, you want to mold the entire story around it, but in the end you need to look at the story as a complete organism, not just a bunch of parts thrown together a la Frankenstein's monster, because just like Frankenstein's monster, if some of your story parts work better than others, it still stands a chance of derailing your entire story, going on a violent rampage that might end in a misunderstanding with a small girl drowning in a lake, which we can't have.
Sorry about that joke. Please don't hurt me.
For a quality, cohesive story, you need to make sure that all the parts are in good working order, and if that means altering, changing or maybe even removing some of the big scenes you had in mind from the beginning to make it work, then that's what you have to do. It may feel awful to do it, but in the end, your story, and your readers, will thank you for making it all make sense in the end.
Thanks for that like, speech, man, but can we go back to our drugs, premarital sex and investigating strange noises now?
Then again, maybe some characters were meant to jump through hoops.
So dear readers, are there any pet peeves in fiction that have always bugged you? Sound off in the comments below!
And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!
Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor
-- Matt Carter
(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
So dear readers, are there any pet peeves in fiction that have always bugged you? Sound off in the comments below!
And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!
Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor
-- Matt Carter
(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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