5 Easiest Plot Mistakes to Make While Writing Fiction

I know because I’ve made every single one of them, like, a billion times each (rounding up to the nearest billion). These hamstring my manuscripts like nothing else, and they’re so devious! It’s relatively simple to spot when I’ve taken the story on a tangent that has nothing to do with the plot or when I make a transition too fast. But catching these ones?

It’s like trying to find Waldo in a red-white-and-blue convention. They all cloak themselves in a disguise of “good enough.” Well, I think to myself, I’m just bored because I already know this story. I bet someone reading it for the first time would be intrigued.

WRONG.

1. The protagonist is reactive.

This one is tough to spot because there might still be all sorts of crazy things happening in your story! Your protagonist could be chasing crooks, making out with strangers, and/or fighting evil wizards.

But even the most exciting events lose some of their impact if they feel like a series of weird things happening to your protagonist instead of a series of weird things your protagonist is doing. This is the curse of a reactive protagonist.

Most protagonists do stuff. A reactive protagonist reacts to stuff that other characters or forces do. The distinction can be tough; in most stories, there’s an antagonist, and of course his, her, or its actions shape the protagonist’s journey.

But that’s just it: in most stories, the protagonist is on a journey, like, going somewhere, walking places, with a destination in mind. If your protagonist is less on a journey than on a conveyor belt — if things just kind of happen that he can’t anticipate — if she only ever does stuff because immediate circumstances prod her to — then it might be time to consider ways you can make him or her active rather than reactive.

But wait! What if the protagonist has to react to things? What if he or she isn’t motivated to do stuff on his or her own?

Then the problem might be…

2. The protagonist doesn’t have a plan to achieve a goal.

Every time I’m having super-duper problems with a section of story — particularly a mystery — this is the reason why.

Usually, I’m good about giving my protagonists their overarching motivation: Karen wants to go to theatre school, Graves wants to stop the bad guy, Lizzie wants to go home. But it’s so easy to forget to give them mini-goals they want to do in order to achieve that big one in most, if not all, scenes.

For instance, in the stupid story I’m working on now, my protagonist definitely wants to go where the action is and find her friend. But once she leaves, I had her sort of ambling through the action, all reactive and whatnot. NO.

To fix this, what I really needed to do was give her a moment-to-moment goal: find my friend. Find out what my friend knows. And I needed her to build a specific plan for doing those things: talk to her. Convince her to get out of the action.

Now, you might well ask, but what if your protagonist is reluctant? What if he or she’s an Arthur Dent who just got caught up in this stuff and doesn’t really want anything specific?

Then my problem is probably…

3. The protagonist doesn’t want to do whatever the plot is.

I’m not saying that stories where the protagonist is reluctant never work. They totally can. The trouble is, if your protagonist doesn’t want to do whatever the plot is, he or she needs a really cracking motivation to do something more exciting, and that something also needs to tie into the plot at least a little so you don’t wind up with a disjointed story that leaves your readers unsatisfied.

My big problem with this is when writing using a detective-and-sidekick archetype. Part of the archetype is that the genius detective always drags his or her feet about cases that look boring, and then the sidekick has to coax him or her into actually solving the thing.

When my detective was just in a grouchy mood and didn’t have much she could be doing other than the mystery, it was super boring. Like, SUPER boring.

I tried to fix it by giving her a different, concurrent goal that could lead her through solving the mystery at the same time. And, theoretically, that sounded like it should work. But as it turned out, it was still SUPER boring. Why?

Well, I’d accidentally traded this problem for the problem that arises when…

4. The protagonist is stuck on details.

Your protagonist needs to go fight a dragon. Does your reader want to read about her struggling to conquer her lessons in the elite wizard-knight dragon-fighting magic academy or trying to find her math notes so she can study for her calculus test so she can ace the course so she can pass her entrance exam so she can get into Sir Mage’s School of Dragon-Whacking Techniques?

When the protagonist’s goal immediate goal is too minor or feels too causally distant from his main objective, the plot gets tedious. Sometimes, it feels like being at one of those meetings where there’s that one guy or girl who gets hung up on the exact shade of blue you’re going to paint the that one window sill when everyone else just wants to get the freaking house built. Other times, it feels like … if someone looking for math notes excited me, I would go find my own and/or not be reading fantasy.

Sure, technically the protagonist has an immediate goal that advances the plot. But realistically, there are plenty of way better goals she could have that would be more exciting and direct.

Personally, I get mired in scenes like this when, consciously or unconsciously, I’m trying to space out my story — I want to introduce exposition before the first big action set piece, or somewhere in the back of my head, I’ve decided I want to “save” that awesome scene I thought of for maximum impact later in the story. Only it’s not maximum impact, because if my reaction to “Hey, I thought of an awesome scene!” is “Now I’ll think of a lot of way worse ones to make it look better!” instead of “Now I’ll think of some even more awesome ones so my story is full of awesome!” then I might not be writing the best story that I can.

So: I’ve got my active protagonist with an immediate and awesome goal that she’s totally excited about achieving, but the story just doesn’t have that oomph. What gives? Well…

5. The stakes aren’t clear.

It can be so hard to remember that the reader doesn’t automatically understand what the protagonist will gain if he succeeds and/or lose if he fails. *I* know what it would mean to me not to be able to go to theatre school — why doesn’t the reader just get what it means to my main character?

There are lots of different genres of story; things that are serious in some aren’t serious in others. So your reader has no way of knowing whether a piano dropped on someone’s head is a joke (like in Sylvester and Tweety cartoons) or a tragedy to be avoided at all costs (like Eddie Valiant’s brother’s murder in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). Explicit exposition can help; so can tone; and so can being right in the head of your protagonist and showing what he or she feels about what’s happening.

I forget this most often in fantasy, because I’m so busy trying to lay out the main concept (magic? elementals? both?) that explaining simple things like feelings seems pointless. But it’s not.

So those are my five major writing Kryptonites. I guess the only way to get good at spotting them is the one requiring patience: practice, practice, practice.