Argh.

Could I have been more frustrated a couple days ago when, despite having written a 40-ish page synopsis, I still managed to create a plot hole. I've had a couple of days to sort it out. It's not so great a problem that I have to walk away from the story, it's just that I went to such lengths to avoid stumbling into plot holes that having done so again has almost driven me mad.

Here's the deal. I had all the details of my current work, Forever By His Side, nailed down tight. There is a relationship that runs into difficulty. There's a complex magical element. There is a spooky backstory vignette. And there is a mystical meeting that leads to final closure. I needed to have all my ducks in a row to pull this off. Thus the 40-something page synopsis. I took a month to work through it. I read and reread. I gave it a couple of days off so I could triple-check it with somewhat fresh eyes. I was confident everything worked, that there weren't plot holes. All I had to do was follow the synopsis and I was home free.

It sounded great. In theory.

I wrote my first two chapters. They're told from the POV of the main character, a 14-ish-year-old Apalachian girl named Wady. I figured I'd go out on a limb and mimic the Appalachian dialect. So when my critique group got hold of it, I would have expected the critique would be limited to that, the thick dialect. While they did hammer the depth of the dialect, they all agreed that I needed more backstory prior to where I had chosen to start the story. I agreed. During that initial critique, the group had also mentioned that the magical element also needed a bit more clarification. This is where the problem came in.

I was so excited to get started. Even before I got home from the critique, I had what I thought was the solution to all my problems. I would switch up how the magic worked. It would solve all the critique group's concerns.  That night and over the next two weeks, I crafted two chapters that would precede the action of the original two chapters. Never once did I feel concerned that making this little tweak would affect the later action.

Well, I was wrong.

The two new chapters finished and well-received, I looked forward to moving on with the rest of the story. That's when I realized that the "tweak" I had made to the magic element rendered the most important part of the story, the very culmination of the action near the end, impossible.

How could I have missed this? I KNEW the synopsis. I KNEW what had to and what could not happen. I had the synopsis open behind my manuscript document. Still, it didn't occur to me. I simply didn't think it through. 

And I've been taking this as a personal shortcoming. It's simple laziness or denial. And it's not like this is the first time I've done this. The whole reason I wrote out a synopsis of this detail was because I had failed to think my plots through adequately, leaving me in the middle of an impossible situation, where only a mediocre ending could be reached. Huge time wasted unless I took away something that would better my writing in the future.

Fortunately it's fixable, but, as I alluded to at the beginning of this post, I was so frustrated I could have scrapped the whole thing. The chapters, the story, writing, everything. And argh.

Folks, the synopsis is there not only to craft the story into something that works; it's there to maintain direction. It's a reference, so if you don't refer to it, you get what you deserve.