Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Get Your Suspension of Disbelief Out of My Plot Hole

This chapter won't provide you with any incites into becoming a better writer, and in fact a lot of my frustration has more to do with movies than anything I particularly see in here. However, if you write stories long enough, or even read comments on other people's writings, you're eventually going to run into the notorious accusation of a plot hole. A plot hole is a thing in the plot that doesn't make sense. It's giant gap in knowledge where information doesn't match up with what we know. The following chapter is a rant about plot holes, or more specifically, the times when someone cries wolf about a plot hole. 

In previous chapters, I've often said that any characterization goes as long as it makes sense within it's narrative. That's an important phrase, by the way. Things should make sense. You can write a character that get jump 50 feet in the air. You can put him in a world where jumping 50 feet in the air is normal. However, if you do that, don't write me a scene where the character has been stopped because there is a 45-foot wall in his way. He can jump 50 feet, he'll jump over the wall, you wrote yourself a plot hole.

This chapter is not about plot holes nor is it about ways to avoid them. Being able to write a cohesive story and keep your facts straight is an art, and while I could probably put together a list of 5 things to help you avoid plot holes, I'm not doing that today, I got to leave something for chapter 200. In the end, you need to be able to tell a cohesive story, where characters, their motivations, and the world fit. Every time you write something that seemingly breaks this rule, you have some pissed off readers.

However, even if you do close all your plot threads, and end everything with a proper explanation, it doesn't seem to matter, because there are people in this world that will call anything a plot hole. This is something that has always annoyed me, and I'm going to tell you what I mean right now.

I've mentioned this concept at previous times in Wattpad 101. Most things people call plotholes are not plotholes. Maybe you, the reader, aren't given the whole story, and maybe that's intentional, but not having every answer spelled out for you does not make something a plot hole. I'll often see people accusing movies of having plot holes when that plot hole is easily explained in a deleted scene.

One of the most notorious ones that pisses me off is the claim that Independence Day has a massive plot hole in that they use modern electronics to load up a virus on the mother ship. There is a deleted scene that showed Jeff Goldblum trying to develop this very virus! Look, if a 15 second scene you're not shown can explain your "plot hole", then it's not a plot hole.

If you want to say that because it wasn't in the final film, then it doesn't count... then why don't we apply that same stupid logic to everything? Every time the screen changes and we go with the main character in another place... well, I didn't see them get up, get in the car, and drive there... so naturally, it's a plot hole. They must have teleported. I mean... it's the only explanation, right?

Oh, and for those of you say... blah... blah... blah Independence Day still hacked alien technology with a mac... it was established in the story that all modern technology and the technological boom came directly out of looking at the alien spaceship. Our technology was literally built off of and in order to emulate their own... and we had been studying that technology for 50 years! Jeff Goldbloom wasn't building a virus from scratch, he was devising a way to break a well-studied system using an inferior replica of said system. And for those saying the aliens would have done a patch job in the last 50 years... I have to say... when? They were an entire civilization that traveled through space in a giant mother ship to feed their massive resource consumption needs. They were not exactly running an R&R division. And if you want to say something like "Well, they could have..." the answer is they didn't, because the Jeff's hack worked. Which brings me to my next point...

Don't make up completely made up rules to justify a plot hole. If you're reasoning that a plot hole exists is just as complicated of an explanation as what excuses the plot hole, how about going the path of least resistance and just tolerating that this might not be a plot hole! Occam's razor should apply when thinking of plot holes, and it's easier to say... oh, this person fell into some dirt while the camera wasn't on them, rather than claiming there is some plot hole where stains magically appear on people between shots.

On that note, not counting shot mistakes (not something that often happens in literature), where a mug gets spun or moved or flat out removed from the scene between shots, the main thing that gets misinterpreted as a plot hole is something called suspension of disbelief. I've mentioned this term before, especially when discussing writing in the second point of view. Basically, every time you write something that is difficult to believe, you force your reader to suspend disbelief. In other words, accept something that was unlikely to have occurred in the way depicted.

Plot armor is one of those things that can go from being an unfortunate necessity to an annoyance. Most characters in most stories have plot armor. The main character is almost certainly not going to die in 99% of stories. That makes all the tension and fear in all but the horror genre a manufactured thing that shouldn't even exist. However, we don't always complain about it! Why do we complain about it in some stories and not others? I think that comes from when you exceed your suspension of disbelief.

We're all willing to accept the MC has plot armor, but the more unbelievable crap you throw at him that he can survive unscathed, the more difficult it becomes to swallow your story. Eventually, a threshold is reached, and admittedly that threshold differs per person, but at some point, it becomes too much to handle, and we start complaining.

That said, I think a lot of people confuse a suspension of disbelief from a plot hole. A plot hole interrupts the plot. It literally creates a contrivance were previously established parts of the story interfere with later parts. If you have someone gain a pathological fear of heights, you can't have him suddenly ignore that fear cause he needs to take a plane ride to Europe as the plot demands.

A suspension of disbelief is something that has an explanation, it's just one that someone finds hard to swallow. What's a good example? Superman and Clark Kent. He takes off his glasses, he combs back his hair, wears tights and now he's the man of steel. He puts on his glasses, ruffles up his hair, and puts on a suit and tie, and now he's Clark Kent again. Noone nowhere can seem to suspect the two are the same person. Plot Hole!

NO! It's not a plothole, naturally, and you'd never call it a plot hole. Yet, I've heard the word plot hole leveled at very similar kinds of things. Don't think a criminal would get away without getting caught? Plot hole! Don't think he wouldn't recognize her after ten years? Plot hole!

Except none of these things are plotholes, they are just suspensions of disbelief. Almost anyone can suspend disbelief to accept that no one ever calls out Clark Kent on being Superman. Sure, it's made a punchline as a joke a lot, but there are tons of fans of Superman, and none of them ever feel like there experience is ruined because Superman doesn't have a mission impossible mask that he pulls off when he becomes Superman.

However, suspension of disbelief can occur for more than just obvious things. A rule of thumb I like to go by is if you can explain away a plot hole in a single sentence, it probably isn't really a plothole, but a suspension of disbelief. Oh! You claim... but there wasn't enough time for them to get from point A to point B!

This is a tricky thing, and I've seen this criticism a lot leveled at shows like Game of Thrones, where people seemed to cross Westeros during the same time it took others to walk to the curb to take out the trash. However, unless you know the exact amount of time that occurs between two scenes, you can't really say if there was enough time or not. How a book or show is shown to you may not always be the exact order it is occurring in. Just because I showed these people doing this, followed by these people doing that, doesn't mean that they did it in that order in roughly that same timespan.

And perhaps, you do sit down and crunch all the numbers and decide there is just no way Theon crossed half of Westeros in two episodes, it's still not a plot hole. It's a suspension of disbelief. He got there faster than you suspected. You have to imagine the sails caught continuously great wind and they had a lucky break and maybe they left the earliest possible and arrived the latest possible time stamp for any of it to make sense. That's fine... every story needs a little suspension of disbelief.

Or you can call it a plothole, and get another rant from Dorian! Good Luck, and Happy Writing!