Six reasons your plot isn't working

The fix might be easier than you think.

I love plotting. My outlines are borderline ridiculous. Example: I’m currently ghostwriting a middle grade novel with a target word count of 30,000 words. The outline is close to 10,000 words. As I said, ridiculous.

But no matter how detailed and planned-out my outlines, I will always run into some sort of plot issue mid-draft. I think this is pretty typical no matter where you fall on the pantser-to-plotter spectrum. So let’s talk about a few common causes of plot woes.

1. The inciting incident isn’t life-changing enough

This one is tough because sometimes you’re way into the draft before you can even pinpoint this as the problem. 

The inciting incident might be obviously life-changing the moment it happens. Example, when Hiller first sees alien ships in the sky in Independence Day. He doesn’t know exactly what will happen next, but he does know in that moment that his life has just been irrevocably changed. 

But it’s not always that way, right? Your might not fully understand until later that there’s no going back. It might take him most of the journey to realize there is no going home, maybe in the physical sense or the emotional sense or both. Think about Frodo when he first leaves the Shire with the Ring. His life has absolutely been changed forever. But it’s a long time before he realizes he might never make it back home, and even longer before he comes to terms with that fact that even if he does, his life will never be what it was.

In either case, whether the hero knows it or not, there is no way they can go back. So ask yourself this. How would you write your hero sidestepping the inciting incident and continuing on with her life? Look at it from all possible angles. Maybe even put yourself in her shoes and imagine what you’d do. 

If you were in a bathroom during an office holiday party when terrorists took everyone hostage... If a tornado ripped you and your whole house from your farm and smacked you down somewhere that was definitely not Kansas... If you were just trying to relax with your family when intruders broke into your vacation home and turned out to be your evil doppelgangers… 

Can you find a way around it? The tighter you can make that incident, the closer you can get to the answer being no, there is literally no way I can go back to my normal life after this, the bigger and more life-changing your inciting incident will be.

2. The stakes aren’t high enough or feel irrelevant

Not all stories are high stakes and that’s okay. Not every story needs to be about one man taking down a bunch of terrorists or trying to figure out how to get home when you’re stuck in a weird world with flying monkeys or trying to figure out what the hell your doppelganger is doing with those FREAKING SCISSORS. Lots of stories are quieter, but no less powerful.

But quiet doesn’t mean low stakes. It’s just that the stakes are more internal. 

A great story ties them together, the internal stakes and the external stakes. If you’ve got a more literary story, the external stakes might seem low but the internal stakes are sky high. And stories with obviously high external stakes still have those internal stakes. John McClane’s estranged wife is one of the hostages. Dorothy is angry with her family for allowing a wicked woman to take her dog away to be euthanized—which, fair, Auntie Em how dare you—but then realizes how much she loves them and spends all her time in Oz trying to get back to them. And as for Adelaide and her battle with her doppelganger, well… Adelaide’s got plenty of internal issues, let’s leave it at that.

3. Tying everything up at the end seems impossible

Okay, I want you to say this out loud: This is a revision problem, not a first draft problem. I have never tied up all the loose ends of my plot in a first draft and I don’t know any author who has. So if you’re drafting right now, please don’t stress about this too much.

Now let’s talk about when you’re revising. There’s an element of your story, maybe a subplot, maybe a specific side character, maybe a scene, and now that the draft is complete you can see it’s not resolved. It’s not explained. It doesn’t have a purpose. Why is that?

Here’s a mistake I make a lot: in the outlining and drafting phases, I have ideas like this that I get super attached to. I add them in and trust I’ll figure out a way to justify them later. Sometimes I do! But sometimes I don’t. And take it from me, you don’t want to spend weeks, months, even years reworking a book over and over because you’re too stubborn to admit that element just doesn’t belong in this story. When you’re revising or rewriting, be ruthless. If you it doesn’t fit, cut it. You may very well find the right story for that element one day, but this story isn’t it. 

Now, if you know all of your characters and subplots and scenes DO belong and they SHOULD wrap up nicely at the end but you’re overwhelmed with HOW to do that—make a bookmap. 

A bookmap is like a post-draft outline that gives you a bird’s eye view of your story. Write a summary of each scene. Include the timeline, the setting, the characters present, and their wants or goals and whether or not they achieve them. Then list any new information the reader learns in this scene, what changes and how the scene moves the plot forward, and what, in your opinion, is the POINT of this scene. 

This isn’t meant to be pretty or voicey. Don’t be coy with your language or try to keep your story’s secrets from some imagined reader. You’re the only person who’s going to read this. Make it blunt. Use bullet points and make it easy to read at a glance. Having this bookmap will make spotting connections and tying up all those loose ends much less overwhelming.  

Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in a post about book maps!

4. The between-beat scenes are boring

Let me say this first: you shouldn’t have filler scenes in your book. Yes, not every scene is a giant, action-packed, surprise twist turning point. But if you find yourself bored out of your mind when you’re writing a scene, then you need to be honest with yourself about what it’s doing there in the first place. (Maybe it’s a story laxative…)

Okay, second of all: this is also more of a revision problem, not a first draft problem. Don’t let this trip you up too much when you’re drafting. When you’re drafting, sometimes scenes you write don’t serve the purpose of moving the story forward, but they do serve the purpose of allowing you to learn something about your story or your characters. For example, maybe you wrote a party scene that really doesn’t belong in the story but what you as an author got out of writing it was an interaction between two characters with a particularly complicated dynamic. That’s great! Take that interaction, that dynamic, get rid of the party, and (in revisions) find other scenes where you can showcase that element of their relationship. 

I also think this is another case where creating that bookmap I mentioned earlier can really help you understand the purpose of those between-beat scenes and how they serve the story. Again, just having that birds-eye view of your story can help you spot plot holes or identify places where your protagonist makes an unrealistic decision or you’re just asking your reader to suspend a little bit too much disbelief. 

5. Writing expected genre tropes while still surprising readers is just hard

Romance readers usually expect a happily ever after. Mystery readers want a twist that shocks them while simultaneously making them say oh, yes, of course that’s whodunit! Fantasy readers love a good quest after a magical object but will be the first to tell you if you’re just written a Lord of the Rings knockoff.

Maybe the biggest challenge of writing genre fiction is meeting readers’ expectations of beloved tropes but avoiding cliches and still pulling off a surprise or two. If you’re writing in a particular genre and you’ve been trying really hard to subvert cliches, to write a wholly unique plot that will shatter expectations yet still satisfy die-hard fans of the genre...consider this.

Maybe it’s not your plot that’s ticking you off. Maybe it’s your characters.

If you look at standout stories in every genre, the reason they’re so beloved isn’t because they defied every trope and changed the game. Most of them deliver on the expected tropes. It’s the characters we love. It’s the characters we want to follow on this journey. It’s their flaws, the way they get themselves into trouble and then get out of it, it’s the thing they want that we’re rooting for them to get and the thing they NEED that we’re hoping desperately they figure out in time.

It’s not just the journey they go on. It’s how that journey transforms them. That’s why we care. 

Your rom-com, your space opera, your epic fantasy quest, it might, and probably should, share a lot in common with the plots of others in the genre. Don’t stress too much about reinventing that plot wheel. Focus on your characters because they’re what makes your story unique. And when you have truly well-developed characters making choices and taking action and driving your plot, it will feel fresh and original, too. 

6. The pacing is bleh

Are you tired of hearing me say this is a revision issue? Sick of me talking about bookmaps yet? Too bad.

No first draft is perfectly paced. While pacing is definitely something you want to consider when you’re outlining or drafting, remind yourself that there WILL be pacing work to be done in the revisions stage no matter what, so don’t stress too hard over it.

And yes, a bookmap is gonna help. A lot. 

Although, I’ve got another option for you: if you don’t want to create a book map, just print out your draft, single-spaced, in the smallest legible font. Grab some different colored highlighters or pens and mark it up—dialogue, action, introspection, reveals, twists, confrontations—and you’ll be able to see the balance you’ve got, and identify places to work on in order to achieve the balance you want.

Do you have tips on working through plot issues? Let everyone know in the comments!  

The posts I publish here will remain free. But I have a new series called Ask the Editor, which publishes every Friday. The short pitch: Dear Abby for writers.

The longer pitch: paid subscribers ($5/month or $50/year, cancel anytime) will receive a link to a form where they can submit pretty much anything within a two page limit. Things like…

• Queries

• Synopses

• Pages from their novel

• Questions about writing or traditional publishing

• A current problem or situation in their writing journey (ie: trying to decide if an agent is a schmagent, disagreeing with beta feedback, etc)

• A rant about this whole “trying to get published” endeavor to a sympathetic ear

Every Friday, I’ll respond to/critique as many submissions as I can and publish them together in one post. Because they’ll be behind a paywall, there’s some privacy—your query, pages, or rant about that one really horrible rejection won’t be online for editors to discover when they Google you.

That’s it! I hope to see you over there. :)

Michelle