Plot Holes And Pot Holes: 8 Common Mistakes Readers Hate—And How To Fix Them

Beware plot and pot holes in your fiction! We all come face to face with them, those pesky glitches, oopsies, OMGs and WTFs that ruin a story, turn a reader off, guarantee a slew of one-star reviews—and kill sales.Beta readers will often point them out. Editors are professional fixers, always on the lookout for booboos. You will realize them yourself when you wake up at 3AM sudden realizing that the MC’s beloved pet who started out as a friendly, tail-wagging Golden Retriever, has somehow become a snarling, saber-toothed attack dog.These unforced errors range from plot holes, small and economy-size, to lapses in logic. They also include poorly conceived characters, blah settings, pointless dialogue, and momentum-killing info dumps. Even a few will make your book—and you—look like a loser on amateur night.You need to find them—and fix them—before readers do.1. Lapses in logic.Your MC is stranded on a dry planet in a far galaxy but when the villain suddenly appears bent on revenge and brandishing a nuclear ray gun, said villain falls into a deep puddle and drowns.Your cute, adorable if somewhat ditzy heroine is a lousy, horrible, terrible cook. The reader falls in love with her—until she cooks a four course gourmet dinner for her hunky new boyfriend.Your MC has just broken her leg and is lying helpless in the middle of the road waiting for an ambulance but suddenly gets up and kicks the you-know-what out of her antoganist. Uh. Really?“&$#%!!?” thinks your reader as s/he throws your book across the room.The fix.In cases like this, the lapse is the result of inadvertantly omitting the necessary set up. Go back several scenes and let your reader know that—The dry planet in a far galaxy experienced a once-in-a-century-torrential rainstorm. Residual puddles, deep and dangerous, lurk and your villain, who we now know is color blind, thanks to your new, artful set up, does not see the beautiful, shimmering but deep and dangerous turquoise blue water.Oh, and did Ms. Ditzy, win a course with Monsieur Master Chef in a cute and adorable contest? If you go back and insert such a scene, why, yes, of course she did. Got at A , too!Your MC thinks quickly and, despite being in excruciating pain, fashions a splint out of a nearby fallen branch, thus allowing him or her to get up and kick the bleep out of the antagonist. That is one MC not to be messed with!2. Mean girls (and boys).Your heroine, Sally, is madly in love but falls even mad-lier in love when a handsomer, richer, sexier, guy comes along and catches her eye (plus other parts of her anatomy).Could be the basis of a suspenseful/comic/sad situation, but if bf #1 is never mentioned again, if Sally never gives him another thought, or never has even a transient moment of regret or what-if, you’ve got a heroine so self-centered and maybe even narcissistic that no reader can relate.Not just girls, either. Just read the headlines to find plenty of examples of guys who are far less than stellar. You really expect a reader to stay with this kind of guy for very long? Their wives divorce them, their girl friends dump them and so should you.The fix.Check your characters for basic decency or, in extreme cases, mental health, but don’t forget that even villains must have a redeeming quality.3. Info dumps.Blah,blah, blah. And then this happened and after a while that happened. Blah,blah, blah. Then they went from here to there and that’s why blah blah blah.Info dumps stop the plot in its tracks. They are boring to read and, in fact, boring to write. Readers hate them and writers should, too.You should be on info dump alert whenever you review your manuscript and see long, dense grey blocks of text or lengthy paragraphs of narrative.  You should also pay attention whenever you bore yourself writing. Trust me, it happens. [image error]