Took me 3 hours to figure out my character's motivation was wrong

I spent a whole Saturday rewriting a scene where my detective interrogates a suspect, but it felt flat. Then I realized I had the suspect's reason for lying backwards - he wasn't hiding guilt, he was protecting his sister. Has anyone else had a plot hole eat up a whole day before you spotted it?

2 comments

2 Comments

walker.robert8d ago

Exactly this. I had a similar thing where my protagonist kept stalling in a scene (you know, that brick wall feeling) and it turned out I had her motivation for entering the building dead wrong. She wasn't there to find evidence, she was there to protect someone else entirely. Once I flipped it, the whole thing clicked into place and I wrote the next three pages in twenty minutes. It's wild how one wrong assumption can make everything feel fake and clunky, like a bad puzzle where none of the pieces fit.

jakef668d ago

Did you try rewriting the opening of the scene first, or did you just jump ahead once you fixed the motivation? I've had that same thing happen where I'd rewrite the entrance and suddenly everything that came after made sense too. For me, it was a character who kept refusing to open a door, and I realized he wasn't scared of what was inside, he was scared of what he'd have to do to someone he cared about once he got in there. @walker.robert nailed it with that protect someone else angle, that's a sneaky one that can trip you up for weeks.