Introduction

Why didn’t the eagles just fly the Ring to Mordor?

This is a debate that’s spanned decades, divided friend groups and fans alike, as one of the most popular plot holes in the Lord of the Rings series. Readers aren’t searching for a reason to dislike your book. They’ve set aside time and effort trusting that the story logic works. But once something isn’t working, they recognize it, even before they can name it.

Speculative fiction is especially vulnerable. You built the rules, so readers will test them, much like a turing test on AI. Magic systems, technology, and politics created by the author are fair game. Once a reader cracks the issue and shares their findings, nobody can unsee it.

Today, we’ll close the gaps: first by defining what a plot hole is, then by building a plan to find them, and finally organizing your toolkit for fixing them.

What Counts as a Plot Hole (and What Doesn’t)

A plot hole is a place where your story contradicts itself or skips an answer the plot depends on. That’s narrower than a story that merely disappoints. Readers can hate an ending without it being broken. Three failures account for most of what gets flagged: logic, setup, and payoff.

The logic failure: contradictions and gaps. This is the true plot hole: the story’s own established information produces a contradiction, or leaves a gap the plot needs filled. Authors rarely do this on purpose. More often the justification lives in the author’s head, or is only implied, and never makes it onto the page.

That’s the Eagles problem. They’re powerful, sentient, and friendly to the cause, yet nobody raises them as an option at the council in Rivendell. One line explaining why they can’t be used would close the question. Defenders have good answers: the Nazgûl and their fell beasts, the Eye of Sauron, the eagles’ own independence. But those answers are mostly assembled by fans, not stated in the text. This isn’t a dig at Tolkien. It’s the most famous example of why you shouldn’t have to justify your story after the fact.

The setup failure: plot convenience. Here the story solves a problem with something it never prepared. The spell the character suddenly remembers studying years ago. The secret weapon never mentioned until the moment it’s needed. The hidden passage that saves the hero from the killer. Usually the author wrote themselves into a corner and forced a way out.

Each of these could have worked if it had been planted earlier, as a Chekhov’s Gun. Without that, readers feel the cheat. The extreme version is deus ex machina, where an outside force resolves the climax. The Eagles arguably fit here too, since they’re absent from the plan and then arrive to save the day. They’re a rare example of both failures at once.

A rule I first heard about introducing characters works just as well for story tools: everything your protagonist needs to face the climax should be on the page by the 50% mark.

The payoff failure: dropped threads. Not every question needs and answer. Leaving a few threads open can make a world feel like it continues pas the final page. The ones to avoid are the questions your story raised as central to the plot or a major subplot, because the readers expect those to be resolved by the climax or the ending. A promised confrontation that never happens, or a mystery the whole book circled, is a debt the reader is waiting for you to pay.

What doesn’t count? Before you start fixing, make sure you’re fixing the right thing:

• Backstory the plot never needs. An unexplained detail that nothing depends on is texture, not a hole.
• Questions answered later. Check whether the answer exists before you patch it.
• Mysteries clearly framed as mysteries. If the reader knows the question is open, it’s a hook.
• Defensible choices some readers find too convenient. The War of the Worlds is the classic case. The Martians fall to bacteria, but the narrator does offer an explanation: they had cleared such germs from their own world ages ago. You can find that too neat, but it isn’t a gap.
• Outcomes a reader dislikes: A character making a bad decision that fits who they are is characterization, not a plot hole.

Here’s a test to carry with you: does the story’s own established information produce a contradiction, or a gap the plot needs filled? If yes, you have a hole. If not, you may just have a reader with different tastes.

Plot holes slip past even experienced writers, mostly because we know our stories too well to see the gaps. Now that you know what you’re looking for, lets find them before your readers do.

How to Find Them Before Readers Do

Once you hit publish, or send your final copy to your publisher, the book is out of your hands. You can’t see your own plot holes because you already know all the answers, so finding them requires you read like a reader, who only has the page. So, how do you ensure you’re sending out the best book for your readers? That means recreating the readers position through distance: in time, in format, in person, and in what’s actually on the page.

Distance in time. The greatest asset an unpublished author has is time. With no deadlines, you can set the manuscript aside, and 6-8 weeks is a commonly recommended break.You’ll forget the minor details of the story and return with fresh eyes. Published authors on deadline can get a similar effect by working on something unrelated, like blog posts, social media, or audience interactions. You know those days that feel like three crammed into one, wher the morning seems ages ago? Aim for that feeling.

Distance in format. Changing how you take in the text. Have your computer read your story to you like a poorly executed audiobook. It keeps you from sliding into the entertainment value of the story and forces you to catch each detail as it arrives. Or print off your manuscript, if you can. A printed page reads differently than a screen, and missing pieces are easier to spot.

Distance in person. Drafting gives you some of this for free. By the final chapter you’ve grown as a writer, so chapter one reads like a different story.Fast drafters can simulate this by reading as on of their ideal readers. If your audience loves the hard rules of science fiction, read like that person and check that every rule is followed.

The page only. We carry libraries of information on almost everything in our book, and only fractions make it onto the page, so audit what’s actually there. Read through and highlight every detail that sets a standard. If a character has blue eyes in chapter one, they shouldn’t turn hazel by the end without a reason. If your magic only works under every third full moon, verify the timeline holds on the page, not just in your head. Track each rule and character detail in your story bible, note where it was established, and check that it holds throughout.

Finding plot holes is a lot of work, but it pays off.

Fixing Them Without Breaking the Book

Fixing a plot hole is easy. Fixing one without breaking something else is the hard part, because every change alters what your reader knows, and a patch in chapter four can open a new hole in chapter twenty. Once you’ve confirmed you have a real hole, there are four ways to close it: adding, changing, removing, or lampshading. The goal is to pick the smallest fix that works.

Once you go through these fixes you’ll want to rerun the previous sections to ensure you didn’t miss any ripples caused by the updates.

Conclusion

So, why didn’t the eagles just fly the Ring to Mordor? One line at the council might have ended decades of debate. That’s the smallest fix there is, and it’s why this work pays off.

Your book will have its own version of that question. Every book does. What matters is whether you find it before your readers do. Start by defining what’s actually broken: a failure of logic, setup, or payoff. Then read like a reader by creating distance in time, format, person, and page. Finally, choose the smallest fix that closes the hole, and recheck for ripples.

You won’t catch everything, and not every fix will help the book. But readers come to your story hoping to trust it enough to settle in. Every gap you close is one less thing standing between them and that refuge. As the saying goes, art is never finished, only abandoned. Do the work, then let it go.

Additional Resources

• Story Grid (Shawn Coyne) for scene level analysis
• Sanderson’s Laws of Magic (his lectures and blog essays

Previous Post: Plotting Short Stories: Crafting Concise Narratives

Next Post: Plot Formulas: When to Use Them and When to Break Them