Tag: plot hole

Googled Questions: Part II

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Every once in a while, I like to take a look at what search terms bring people to my blog. Helpful as it is, it’s also fun to see how people stumble upon the site. Sometimes, however, it seems there are questions that are never really answered that still end up with people on the blog. It’s for these people that I like to do a quick Q&A to hopefully answer more thoroughly what they were originally trying to Google (read the my first Q&A post here).

1. Is “shut the light” grammatically correct?

Yes, grammatically it’s fine. As to common…”shut the light” as a phrase is regional–mainly used in Brooklyn/the New York area from my understanding. More commonly you will hear “turn off the light” in common parlance. If your character is from Brooklyn, however, it is grammatically correct and a great way to show some regional differences in speech patterns.

2. What is the DSM diagnosis is for the movie Silver Linings Playbook?

Touched on briefly in this post, Silver Linings Playbook depicts Bradley Cooper’s character, Pat, having Bipolar Disorder (seemingly Type 1). I’m not sure if Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Tiffany, is ever diagnosed, but she seems to admit to suffering from some form of Clinical Depression (Major Depressive Disorder [MDD] in the DSM) and Hypersexuality (currently labeled as Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified [Sexual Disorder NOS] in the DSM, with a push to have Hypersexual Disorder added in the appendix), perhaps caused and/or exacerbated by her husband’s recent death.

3.  Should I accept to be a ghost writer on commission?

Probably originally directed to this article, my advice would be a resounding “no”. If you are looking for a little more experience and don’t especially care about how much you get paid for your work, you can. Unless best sellers, however, books tend to make very little in royalties to start with. If you don’t have Obama offering commission on his next memoir, you’re not likely to see much, if anything, for your work.

4. What is bad about Black Wyrm Publishing’s contract?

Not having any experience with Black Wyrm myself, I turned to Preditors and Editors and Absolute Write Water Cooler to see what other authors have to say (both good sites to look at when you’re looking at publishing with someone who isn’t a “big  name”). Preditors and Editors states “Poor Contract. Not recommended.” and Absolute Write Water Cooler has little about them in general. Their name pops up a few more places as not recommended, but I can not find much other than the fact that something seems to be off about their contracts. Their site, however, does state, “Our typical contract stipulates that BlackWyrm provides the editing, cover design, money for printing, promotion, and ebook conversion. BlackWyrm keeps the revenue until the book breaks even, then splits the money evenly with the author thereafter.” While this sometimes happens in the event of an advance (where the publisher pays X amount of dollars as a down payment to the author to then be made up in royalties) it is not common/accepted if there is no advance to an author. It is the publisher’s duty, as a publisher, to put up money for all they have stated/pay for it out of their share of the royalties. If they have not already given any money, it’s a poor contract to allow them to take all money made from the book until they “break even” (a term that sounds very easy to exploit). I imagine this is the clause to which Preditors and Editors is referring.

5. Is SBPRA (Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Agency) a scam?

Taking a look at Preditors and Editors once again we find “Poor contract. Strongly not recommended.” along with  “Currently being sued by Florida State Attorney General.” for fraud including showing books which they have not actually published as their “success stories”. So, at best, they are a vanity press (one that charges you to publish your book: read more about those here) and, at worse, a scam. I would recommend staying far away.

6. Why is the Time Turner a plot hole in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban?

Time travel is a wishy-washy, trip yourself up sort of thing. While it can be done well, and is rather popular for the time being, it also leaves you open to a bunch of possible plot holes along the lines of, “If X happened, then Y happens, but Z happened…so how did X happen?” For Harry Potter specifically, the main plot hole which the Time Turner introduces is, if time travel is readily accessible for the wizards in the Harry Potter universe, why didn’t anyone just go back in time and stop Voldemort at any point along the way? And why do they never use it again after Prisoner? It could come in handy, no doubt.  Good as a plot device for the events in the third book, it opens up a can of worms for the integrity for the rest of the novels.

Plot Holes (Part III)

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With everyone buzzing around Plot Hole articles (Parts I and II) it was pointed out that I missed a comment from Secretly_Samus, author of Shannon on Writing and Rewriting, on Part I. Secretly_Samus writes:

“This [Plot Holes Part I] makes me…ponder the question, how do you know when you have a plot hole?”

I apologise for the delay, but to help everyone who wonders if they have a plot hole, “The Pesky Plot Hole Questionnaire” can be a lot of help.

So don’t stress yourself too much over it, but if you’re worried about possibly having a plot hole on your hands, try asking yourself some of these questions (both from the original questionnaire on Freelance and Fiction and some I’ve added myself):

  1. Do your characters overlook obvious solutions to their problems? (e.g. the heroine forgets to use her incredible knowledge of karate when she’s attacked.)
  2. Do your villains conveniently overlook or pooh-pooh the one flaw that could let the hero escape?
  3. Does the cavalry arrive more quickly than is physically possible? (Your character took three days to cross the mountains. She gets thrown in jail. Her sidekick, who didn’t start the journey until learning of her predicament, is there springing her out the next day.)
  4. Are people a little too willing to help the heroes? (Or a little too unwilling?)
  5. Do you tell reader that the hero’s plan was brilliant but refuse to actually reveal how he/she pulled it off? (Skipping past the daring action can be a huge cop-out.)
  6. Do your heroes recover from physical trauma much too quickly? (Recovery times may vary greatly due to fantasy potions and sci-fi gadgets, but those elements need to be set up well in advance.)
  7. Do your heroes recover from emotional trauma too quickly? (We want to empathize with the     protagonists, and that can be hard when we’re still grieving over a killed-off character and the hero is running around like nothing happened.)
  8. Does the hero/heroine go ALONE to the one place where the villain will surely find him/her?
  9. Does a problem arise out of nowhere just to spur the plot along?
  10. Have you broken the rules of your universe to get out of a dead-end/move the plot along? (Ok, so people in your fantasy novel can fly, but not higher than 300 ft….except your Main Character when they need to…)

If anyone can think of others, please feel free to comment below/message me to add them.

Plot Holes (Part II)

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Since writing my first blog post about Plot Holes, I have gotten a few requests from people to point out some plot holes in famous stories. As I am not one to disappoint my readers, I have compiled some examples of plot holes I know, and that have been pointed out on other fun sites, for your reading pleasure. (So, while trying to edit out your own plot holes, at least take comfort in the fact you’re not alone).

Note: Should perhaps be obvious but, hey, spoilers ahead.

Harry Potter

1) The first thing people always have to point to when talking about plot holes it seems–the Time-Turner. For those that haven’t read the Harry Potter Series, or anything about them, or seen the movies, etc. “The Time-Turner was a device capable of time travel. The Time-Turner resembled an hourglass on a necklace. The number of times one turns the hourglass corresponds to the number of hours one travels back in time. It is extremely important that the user of a Time-Turner not be seen by past or future versions of themselves unless, of course, said versions are aware of their usage of a Time-Turner. A possible scenario is a wizard or witch killing their past or future selves by mistake” (Harry Potter Wiki). In Prisoner of Azkaban, brainiac Hermione Granger is using a Time-Turner to take several classes that happen at the same time of day, and it comes into play at the climax of the story.

Now time travel is a can of worms for any story, but the main point here is…If the wizards in Harry Potter are able to use time travel, why didn’t they just all go back to before the trouble started and keep it from happening?

There have been several arguments as to how this plot hole could be covered , but still it is a problem. Perhaps they all are destroyed in Book 5, but why didn’t they do it in the first four books (or before the series even started)? Perhaps within the realm of Harry Potter time travel you can only jump back, not move forward (making it so your future self doesn’t want to go too far back and not be able to catch back up to the “present”) but why then not find someone who doesn’t want to be in the present anyway, offer them a lot of money and have them go live a couple decades ago? All in all, it’s a problem J. K. Rowling opened up in Prisoner of Azkaban, and never could fully patch.

2) Wands changing ownership. “According to the seventh book, Harry disarmed Malfoy. Malfoy was the true owner of the Elder Wand, and so Harry became the true owner. If disarming was a suitable method for gaining ownership of a wand, then everyone in the DA would own each other’s wands.”

3) Horcruxes. “In COS [Chamber of Secrets], the horcrux in Harry should have died when the basilisk pierced him? Even though Fawkes healed him a few minutes later, the diary was destroyed in seconds when it was pierced, why should it take longer for the “Harry horcrux” to die.”

Twilight

All right, I’ll try not to pick on Twilight too much (lord knows I’d like to), but just some points that really bother me (not counting factual errors like the whole “west coast” of Brazil thing [here’s a map of South America if you don’t get why that’s eye-rolling).

1) Edward is undead, his skin is ice-cold, doesn’t have blood circulating, but he’s still able to be, ahem, intimate and produce a child. Of course, as this blogger puts it, “Then again, he’s taken twelfth grade chemistry like a hundred years in a row; maybe he’s developed a new form of Viagra or something.”

2) Even after all her research in Twilight, Bella has no idea they sparkle instead of burn in the sunlight. In New Moon, Edward goes to get himself killed by revealing he’s a vampire by what this forum poster calls a “sparklefest”. As they put it, “did he not think of the fact that NOBODY KNOWS SPARKLING = VAMPIRE? Seriously, if they did see him in the sun, I bet they’d all just go, ‘Dude, it’s St Marcus’ Day, not Mardi Gras. God, you’re such a twat’.”

3) Alice’s visions. So many to choose from here (such as her visions only happening when convenient to the plot) but the big one I’ve seen pointed out goes against the rule Meyers has given her visions (that they can be changed based on people making different choices: “In Midnight Sun, Alice claims to have seen a vision of Bella as a vampire – implying that Bella has made the decision to become a vampire. At this stage, Bella doesn’t even know that the Cullens are vampires. How, then, was Alice able to see something based on a decision that it would have been completely impossible for Bella to make?”

4) And we’ll leave it at one more: “In Breaking Dawn, when Bella wakes up for the first time as a vampire, she describes being able to…hear all the way to the freeway. Sensory overload aside (even though such a high level of assault on the senses would probably have extremely damaging impacts), how is it that she is able to hear everything down to the freeway, yet Alice and Jasper were unable to hear her on the phone to James in the next room?”

The Da Vinci Code

1) Paternity Testing.  “Ok let’s admit that the body is Mary Magdalen and you can do a DNA on the surving Magdalen descendant, you still don’t have Jesus’ DNA.  So, how are you going to prove that the child is Jesus’ and Magdalen’s and not Magdalen’s and some other Joe Schmo.”

2) Clues to the killer. At the beginning the dying man leaves a message with clues to get the main characters started on their quest. He adds in the Fibonacci sequence to make sure his granddaughter is brought onto the case. Was there any reason he didn’t just write down who killed him and why? It seems he would have had plenty of time to.

Wicked/Wizard of Oz

1) Why didn’t Elphaba (The Wicked Witch of the West)’s parents ever bathe her in water? As one forum poster here puts it, “I know she had an inhuman aversion to it even as an infant, but why wouldn’t her folks wash her in it anyway?” It’s a pretty good question in my opinion. Of course, this plot hole would be relatively easy to explain away by saying people tend to wash with something else if that’s what Maguire wanted to do.

The Sound of Thunder

The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury is “all about these guys that use a time machine to go back in time and hunt dinosaurs.  When they arrive in the past, there’s a levitating walkway that they’re allowed to walk on, but they CANNOT step off of it.  The idea is that if you alter anything from the past, it could change the way EVERYTHING happens in the future.  Long story short, one of the guys steps off the platform, accidently kills a butterfly, and when he comes back to the future, all the signs say the same thing, but are spelled differently.

“The biggest hole here is the fact that stepping off the walkway can ruin things, but killing a dinosaur, thus making it fall over, onto land that it never would have originally fallen on, also obviously antagonizing the dinosaur, which would change its course of direction from what it naturally would have been, doesn’t matter.  Why does one butterfly from the human make a difference, but the butterflies that the dinosaurs fall onto, or the fact that dinosaurs are dying unnaturally soon makes no difference?” (Duncan) Personally, I would also like to add to Duncan’s plot hole…there’s a moving walkway in the [insert appropriate paleolithic era here]. How did someone build it/get power to it/etc. without changing anything?

Yet another time travel problem.

And, since I have family in town and blog posts may be few and far between for a week or so more, something to entertain yourself in my absence: Name the Movie by the Plot Hole: http://www.sporcle.com/games/Igon/plotholes_movies_cool (I’m sad I only got 9 of 12…)