: Re: Gadgets that make the world/story broken Every so often I see a nice piece of fiction where its author adds something (to save the plot, or to make it interesting, whatever) that makes the

@Bryan361

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Trying to build a list of all the possible "excess magics" that one could put in a story is probably a hopeless task. For one thing, the list might well be infinite: You could list a thousand things and someone could come up with one more. For another, there are plenty of things that exist in the real world that could provide easy solutions to many plots.

For example, I don't know how many stories I've seen where I just want to yell at the screen, "Why don't you just call the police?" or "Why don't you just tell her you love her?" or whatever. What I find particularly grating about many of these is that a writer with a dime's worth of imagination could toss in some explanation of why the obvious solution doesn't work. Like, the hero calls the police, a policeman comes ... and then it turns out the policeman has been paid off by the criminals and so he just calls back to headquarters, "No hostage situation here. Just some nutjob who wants attention."

And yeah, many many time travel stories, I find myself saying, Why doesn't the hero just go back in time one hour and try a different solution? Why doesn't he go forward to the day before he left and tell himself what he's going to encounter so he can prepare?

As to plugging the plot holes: I think the trick is to make the plug not sound arbitrary. Like in many time travel stories they "explain" why the hero can't go back and prevent World War 2 or save his friend's life or whatever by saying, "We can't change history". But the whole point of the story is that they went back in time and changed things. Why can they change some things and not others? I might buy it if at the beginning of the story they set out some coherent rule of what can be changed and what can't, or if in the course of the story the characters discover this rule. But of course the real rule is, "You can change things that make the story more interesting and you can't change things that make solving the hero's problems too easy."

I heard a lecture by a mystery writer once where he said that he spends a lot of time putting doors in alleys. He explained that what he meant was, if in chapter 10 the hero is chased into an alley, and then just suddenly conveniently finds a door through which he can escape, it looks awfully contrived. But if in chapter 5 he has the hero go to that alley and notice the door and go through it and see where it goes, and THEN in chapter 10 the hero gets chased into the alley and escapes through that door, it doesn't look so contrived. I think that's a big part of the trick. If you bring something up that creates a problem or solves a problem just when you need it, it looks contrived and the reader feels cheated. But if you bring it up a couple of chapters earlier, and then it's there when you need it, the reader feels like he's been given fair warning.

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