One niggle too many...

[khiemtran]

I've been battling lately with various plot niggles in the story at hand. On their own, none of them would be important enough to worry about, but cumulatively they've been starting to tell me something's wrong.

The most nagging one is on the verge of becoming a plot hole - there's one coincidence that's just too big to go unremarked and I've been struggling to find a way to fit it into the rest of the story. I can play it a number of difference ways, from highlighting it as a plot point to trying to explain it away, but none of the solutions really convince *me*. I'm slightly amused that I still can't spot these things back in the outline. If I could, it would save a good deal of writing hours. On the other hand, it's all progress. If not for the story, then for me.

It looks like it's time to go back again and get a newer, better plan. At least I've learnt a bit more about how to handle different situations.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Whinge about it on rasfc. That's usually a good solution ;-)

I don't believe that an outline will stand in for the book - some things you *can* only see in detail, because that's where they happen. An outline must naturally gloss over stuff.

But you knew I'm not fond of outlining...

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Well, one of the advantages of outlining is that it does normally stop this sort of thing from happening. But it's obviously not fool-proof if the fool is big enough.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Does the coincidence resolve something or does it complicate matters?

I always feel that the occasional coincidence, if near the beginning of the book and if it serves to make matters worse for the protag(s), is allowable as being true to life.

Coincidences near the end that help to resolve matters aren't, despite the fact that they also sometimes occur in real life. *g*

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, this coincidence happens too far into the story to count as being part of the setup.

Basically, two friends are on an impetuous airborne mission to intercept a party of soldiers who have kidnapped the parents of one of them, based on a tip-off from an ally of an ally whom they have never met. They find the soldiers, sort of. Only instead of a small party heading north, they find an entire army heading south. With a dragon escort. After a brief and unsuccessful battle, the friends flee through a mountain range pursued by the dragon until at last they lose them in a cloud bank/crash into a mountain valley roughly simultaneously. One friend is left unconscious, the other goes to get help, suffers tribulations on his own and then finds some hunters who ultimately help him contact a recluse who might be able to wake the injured friend from his coma. The recluse arrives within a day and turns out to be ... the ally of the ally who tipped them off about the soldiers in the first place.

From a purely dramatic point of view, it works quite well, and I think the whole does work on the first reading. The niggles only start afterwards. Out of the entire mountain range, the chances of landing within a day's walk of the recluse are quite small. It would be like .. say, R2D2's escape pod landing in such a place that he would end up being sold to an acquaintance of Ben Kenobi. Now, I could tweak things to make it more believable. I could shorten the flight from the dragons to increase the chance that they will land near the recluse. I could turn the one day's walk into one day's travel, and give the recluse the ability to travel very fast. I could have the friends stay a week with the hunters to give the recluse more time to get there (the injured friend being too heavy to move). I could split the recluse and the unmet ally into two different people and have one contact the other. (The unmet ally is significant because he's also unexepcted related to a mysterious bird the friends have witnessed spying for another ally.) Or I could invent a special reason why they happened to crash just near the recluse and make it a plot point. So, they think no-one from the Heavenly Realm is watching do they? Well, how do they explain this?

The problem is, I'm starting to spend more time worrying about how to smooth out the niggle than I am about writing the rest of the story. The friends ultimately don't have to crash near the recluse. They don't even have to leave on this particular mission at all (and there are some other niggles about that too, for instance how the recluse was able to learn from his bird spies about the soldiers but miss the army).

At the moment, I'm leaning towards plucking out some key scenes and images that I happen to like and scrapping the rest. If they get a chance to come up again, all the better. If they don't, so be it.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Yeah... I see your problem. Even if the reader is swept along on first reading, that is a mighty big coincidence! Also the niggle about how the recluse learned about the soldiers but missed the army is a very niggly niggle.

I try to resolve these things by running scenes through in my head until they work, only then do I write them down, but I know not everyone works that way and for some it's not until the words hit the page that the scene comes alive.

Good luck with resolving it all.