One of the most common things to hear from new writers seeking help with their work is, “My story doesn’t make sense.” Everybody has this problem at some point. Sometimes the concern rises from vague feedback. Other times, it’s a feeling you have – a strange, intuitive sense that something is just off. Sometimes the plot doesn’t go in the direction you thought it would, and what you had in the outline no longer works. You try to force it, and oof, now it’s a mess. If you haven’t already, you will undoubtedly have a moment someday where you’re reading back your own writing and you stop and go, “Wait, what?!” And it feels awful, because it’s your own book! If it should make sense to anyone, it should make sense to you, right?
Logical inconsistencies in a story can come from a lot of places, which can make the process of fixing them intimidating. So if you’re looking at a mess and feeling overwhelmed, here are a few places to start.
Character problems vs. plot problems
The first question you should ask is whether you’re having a character problem or a plot problem. These are intertwined, of course, but distinct. A character problem occurs when you lack a convincing answer to the question, “Why did so-and-so do X?” A plot problem, on the other hand, is more, “Why did X happen?” where X is the result of a broader set of cause-and-effect circumstances and not simply the result of a single character’s decision.
Here’s a quick way to spot the difference. It’s not an absolute rule, but it’s one that has served me fairly well so far. Character problems often first rear their heads in the second act of a story. I’ve actually found character issues to be a very common cause of writer’s block that occurs after the inciting incident. If you feel like the ends of your story are tied together well, but with a squishy, rotten middle, you may need to focus on your characters. You’ll probably find at least one that lacks that proper traits or motives to drive the story forward. Or you might find that your characters just feel a little hollow.
If, however, your third act is where the problems set in, you need to examine your plot. A twist may not have been set up properly, or maybe the foreshadowing you were aiming for isn’t coming through. You may also need to look at logical inconsistencies in the worldbuilding of your story. The bottom line is if your story made it through the second act squeaky-clean, but then crumbled as soon as various plot threads began to face a potential resolution, you may need to do more than just tweak a couple of characters.
Like I said, this rule isn’t absolute, but it’s worth thinking about. It tends to hold because the second act is where much of the legwork of character development takes place. The payoff for it – the actual change that occurs in a person – may fall later in the story, but the events and circumstances that drive that change are often found in the second act. Meanwhile, the third act tends to be about resolution, and tying the whole story together. A problem can exist there regardless of how perfectly motivated or well-developed your characters are.
Dive deep into motivation
I mentioned this as a common source of character problems, and it may be the single most common one I’ve seen. Your story simply can’t move forward if nobody wants anything, or if people want the wrong things for your story. But think about how deep our motivations run, as humans. It’s difficult to just wave your pencil around and make the character magically want something different without changing some other fundamental aspect of who they are. So if you need to make a character want X, ask yourself these questions:
- Can X be said to represent or be tied to some abstract value (such as power, acceptance, affection, or knowledge)?
- What traits might a person who values that thing have?
- What circumstances might lead to a person who values that thing being deprived of X?
Use the answers to these questions to adjust the backstory and personality of your character to make the target motive more believable. The key here is that we’re separating out the motivation (the thing the character values) from the goal (the thing the value causes them to want). Failing to do this right off the bat can lead to all kinds of mess when you actually go to start writing. By focusing on the values driving your character’s wants and needs rather than the wants themselves, you may find that a lot of things fall into place.
Let plot follow emotion
But what if you want to go in the other direction, and instead change the plot to fit the characters? What if you really like the character you ended up with, even if it wasn’t the one you intended to write, but now the plot you were aiming for doesn’t make sense? This might be a good choice if you’ve got scenes where a character experiences a strong emotion, then immediately makes a decision that completely contradicts it. It’s not so much the absence of a reason to do something, but the presence of a compelling reason to do something else entirely.
The adjustment you’re going to need to make in this case has to do with decision-making. Your character is simply going to make different choices than you had originally planned. Being able to write strong emotions that feel believable enough that the plot stops making sense if the characters don’t honor them is a sign that you’ve written good characters. Don’t scrap a good character, or remodel their entire personality. Lean into what you’ve created, and let those big feelings take the lead. Allow the character to make a different choice, and let the story reshape itself from there. You may even consider rewriting from scratch starting at that point. (And if that sounds overwhelming, check out my last post on rewriting vs. revising, and why this is probably the best thing you could possibly do for your manuscript anyway.)
Cut a character
Sometimes, your character problem is that the character shouldn’t be there at all. I used to run into this all the time when I first started seriously writing novels. I had these huge casts, mostly made up of people who had no business being in the story at all. Often one of these would be a self-insert of some kind, but sometimes they were just plain redundant.
The key to identifying which characters may need to be fired is not to look at who they are, but their role in the plot. It’s tempting to say that someone must be in the story because they would logically be in the main character’s life. But this isn’t real life – this is storytelling, and everybody needs a story-based reason to be there. Even a socially anxious introvert like me interacts with a lot of people on a day to day basis: coworkers, friends, neighbors, family, the Amazon delivery guy. If I was a protagonist, as my 15-year-old self once dreamed, not all of them would have any business being in the story. You don’t need five character foils, three father figures, and a partridge in a pear tree to get the point across. You only need one.
Try to write down every character’s role in the story as it relates to the protagonist. This list shouldn’t look like, “frenemy; mom; annoying boss.” It should look like, “love interest; mentor; antagonist.” Don’t list what they are – list what they’re doing there. Then look for overlapping roles. There will be some cases where this is okay, but you may well find there are areas where you can do some trimming and consolidating and not feel too much of a loss. This tidying up of your cast will not only solve problems, but possibly expose others, now that there’s less clutter around to distract you from them. And be ruthless. I know it’s hard. I know you’re emotionally attached. Take a deep breath and let them go.
Add foreshadowing
So you’ve ruled out your characters and their motivations. There’s no inconsistent or emotionally dissonant decision making. Every character has a defined, useful, non-redundant role in the plot. And yet still, something isn’t making sense. That “wait, what?” moment still won’t go away.
You’ve got a foreshadowing problem, my friend.
It sounds counterintuitive, but readers will only put up with a plot twist if they’ve already seen it coming. Or, more accurately, if they’ve almost seen it coming, but it didn’t quite click into place until the thing actually happened. Foreshadowing is an essential part of storytelling. You could argue it’s a major factor in what makes hearing a good story so satisfying and enjoyable. You may be nervous about your readers guessing what’s about to happen, but trust me, that’s light years better than blindsiding them.
When it comes to your foreshadowing, err on the side of obviousness. Finding ways to weave foreshadowing into your story is a lot harder than taking them out. Trust that your beta readers will alert you promptly and loudly if it really is “too obvious.” But more than likely, it won’t be.
Like I said, a story “not making sense” is such a common complaint, and such a difficult problem to pin down, with so many possible causes floating around. If you’ve experienced this too, I’d love to hear what your go-to strategy is for identifying the source and fixing it. What traps do you fall into the most? Personally, I’m the queen of redundant characters, but I’d love to hear where others have found festering colonies of “wait, what?” in their stories.
Happy writing!