I come across leaps in logic a LOT in editing. And in reading published work. And in watching movies and TV. And in conversation. Well, OK, maybe this is just a pet peeve? Regardless, it’s something you should pay attention to in your writing if you want your story to make sense.
So, what is a leap in logic? Well, since logic is a word thrown around willy-nilly these days, let’s look at the actual meaning of the word. In this context, we’re specifically looking at two subsenses of MW’s definition:
1. a. (1) A science that deals with the principles and criteria of validity of inference and demonstration : the science of the formal principles of reasoning.
1. b. (1) A particular mode of reasoning viewed as valid or faulty.
In essence, logic = reasoning. So, what is a leap in logic? It’s a jump in the cause-effect relationship used in rational thinking. As in, something is missing somewhere between the hypothesis and conclusion. The logic that has been applied is faulty.
1+2≠12.
This is an error that’s mostly exclusive to long-format writing, but I’ve seen it crop up in short stories, too. It happens when you’re so focused on the micro you forget to look at the macro. There’s no shame in making this kind of mistake, we all do it. Sometimes it’s an oversight as simple as forgetting to put a plot point down on paper (I do this all the time), or a faulty timeline, laziness, and especially flawed personal logic.
Something’s Missing
This is probably the most forgivable leap you can make because it’s so easy to do. Not to worry, we all do this and it’s a mistake easily caught if you give yourself space between writing and editing. You only really see these mistakes fall through the cracks into publishing when people are working too fast. Be it the prolific writer who churns out ten books a year or the TV show with a group of writers working without an outline because they could get cancelled at any moment. At any rate, what’s happened is a detail that’s important to the story never made it to the page.
The solution is to make at least three passes in your editing. The first pass you do should be for grammar and syntax because those are the most obvious, even if you just finished writing yesterday. The second pass should be at least a week since the last time you read your story. Ah! No! That’s too long! Well, do what works for your life, but in my experience it’s easier to find mistakes after taking some time to clear your head. This second pass should focus on structure and pacing.
The third pass you do should be done at least a week after your second pass. Again, clear your head. If you don’t need as much time to clear your head, that’s fine. Sometimes working on another project or reading a book is enough. The point is to get your story out of your head. On your third pass, read casually. Pay attention to what is written on the page, not what you know is going to happen. If anything’s missing, add it and reread the chapter to ensure this addition is seamless.
I’m not trying to be prescriptive here. I don’t make rules, I offer advice–and for one simple reason: You simply can’t make hard and fast rules for anything that requires creativity. I personally do way more than three edits because I think editing is fun, but these are the ones I consider bare minimum because that’s how you’re going to catch most of the errors in your writing.
Magical Thinking
Magical thinking is real, my friends. We use it on the daily. Since it’s such a big part of our real lives, of course it makes its way into our writing as well. This is the poster-child of a logical leap. Basically, magical thinking is what we call it when someone makes a causal (not to be misread as casual) link between two events that are otherwise unrelated. Such as anything you might do for good luck. Like rubbing a buddha belly, kissing at midnight on new year’s eve, or never washing your team’s jersey after they win the Super Bowl.
You can use magical thinking intentionally to add a little realism to your characters or even a political structure. That’s not what I’m criticizing here. The problem is when you, the writer, are implementing magical thinking in your plot and don’t realize it.
It’s easy to see this when you’re reading other people’s work, but hard when it’s your own. Sometimes the magical thinking is a result of a missing element, sometimes it’s rooted in bias, and other times it’s a real superstition you have. Because this one can reveal something about ourselves we’re unaware of, it’s hard to catch by yourself. To ensure it isn’t missed, the only solution is a second pair of eyes. That’s why you should always, always have a beta reader or (even better) critique group read your work.
Time Isn’t Linear
OK, don’t discount this and ignore it. This is one of the leaps I see most often in published work. It’s so easy to make this error that it’s often overlooked in editing. But in situations like this you can create a huge plot hole that undercuts the entire story. You can lose tens of thousands of words in cutting to fix an error like that if you’re not careful (take it from someone who has done just that!). Better to make sure your plotline and timeline agree with each other.
Sometimes this comes from too much retconning, as you see in long-running serial fiction like TV and comics. It’s the perfect storm created by multiple writers and the general disorganization that makes it impossible to keep track of years if not decades worth of canon. There’s basically nothing you can do to prevent these errors if you aren’t staying organized from the beginning. Ie, a series bible, which is something I’ll write a post about later.
The easier to miss and more common error is a little more subtle.
A few years ago, I found a timeline error in my novel. Basically, things were happening faster than was humanly possible. Since I’ve become sensitive to this, I’ve noticed it occurring in everything I’ve read and watched that had a compressed timeline of events. I see it most often in travel times, so keep a close eye on things like that.
Some basic questions to ask yourself during your third edit:
- Are your characters engaging in an activity that is only physically possible to accomplish in a certain amount of time?
- Traveling: what distance are they traveling and what is their mode of transit? Ie, if they are travelling by horseback, how far is it possible to go on a horse in a day?
- Production: if they are making something, research how long is realistic for that production. For instance, you can’t bake a pie in ten minutes, but it also won’t take ten hours.
- Character appearances: is one of your characters appearing in multiple scenes while doing something in the background that perhaps the POV character is unaware of? Make sure that their timeline of background doings matches their timeline of cameo appearances. Unless they can be in two places at once, of course.
- Do your seasonal cues agree with the passage of time occurring between events?
- Do you allow your characters to rest? (This is only relevant in compressed timelines. Rest is assumed if your story occurs over the course of a week or longer.)
- If not, it might be helpful to include comments about fatigue, hunger, stress, etc. You should include psychological and medical elements like psychosis if the sleep deprivation is long-term.
- If yes, have you remembered to factor that time into your timeline?
- If you have a magic system that exempts any of the above elements of time, remember to consider the rules you’ve established for that magic system.
- If you have a wind mage putting wind in the sail of a ship to make it move faster, does that agree with the limitations of the wind mage’s magic?
- If you have a character travelling through small amounts of time (to get to class, for example), is the distance in time enough for this character to accomplish the tasks they need to?
The Lazy Writer
There is also what I call “lazy writer syndrome.” These are sometimes assumptions, sometimes oversights. They all have one thing in common: they create huge, gaping, easily-prevented plot holes. The kind where you have to scrap half your work and restart because it’s so essential to the story and you feel like an idiot for overlooking this detail when you wrote your draft. They happen when you, the writer, were too lazy to think about the big picture.
Yes. We saw that. It was obvious. Painfully obvious. To everyone. The good news is that most of these are easily solved with a good, thorough edit or beta read.
Effect Without a Cause
This is an oversight error. As in, you want something to happen because it’s exciting or it moves the plot, but you forgot to consider why this something happens. Sometimes that’s fine, an act of god if you will, other times . . . it’s like shooting your story in the foot.
I read a lot of East Asian comics (mostly manhwa) and translated web novels. One of my favorite tropes is rebirth. It’s actually a misnomer that encapsulates a trinity of related premises: Transmigration: a soul enters another body that was previously inhabited by another soul; reincarnation: a soul is reborn after death into a new body (they have memories of a past life); and regression: a soul goes back in time after death to their own body at a pivotal point in their life
Regression is my favorite of the three because it tends to be angsty and validating. I eat that shit up. Unfortunately, a common problem I see specific to this trope is that no reason is ever given for the regression. Like, does everyone go back in time to a pivotal point in their lives after they die, creating infinite alternate universes?
This is an effect without a cause that’s occurring in the world building. Oversights like that aren’t going to interfere with the plot, but they do indicate that a lack of thought has been given to the premise. In my experience, when this fundamental element is overlooked, the rest of the story tends to be nonsensical and confused. I don’t expect a reason to be revealed right away, but I drop it like it’s hot if I get to a certain point in the story and the MC hasn’t ever wondered “why me?”
The only exception to this absence of the cause-effect link in sources of conflict is when you’re working with limited third person or first person perspectives and the MC never finds out the cause or causes for conflict. This is admittedly a little unsatisfying, but absolutely realistic. We all have conflict in our lives that we don’t always understand, so I’m OK with that. I still expect this missing information to be somehow acknowledged.
As in, doesn’t it PLAGUE you when something crazy happens to you that you don’t understand? You want to know the reason, good or bad, right?
Your audience is thinking it, so why not let your character? Allow your character to ask questions. You don’t have to provide direct answers, but don’t throw a carpet over the elephant in the room, either. Realistically, your characters would want to seek out answers to their questions. And that’s a great way to get the ball rolling in the beginning of your story while reassuring your audience that they’re in good hands.
That said, I will challenge you try some subtlety and drop hints. Even in first and limited-third perspectives you can clue your audience in to things your character doesn’t realize. A famous example is the Game of Thrones fan theory that Jon Snow was a legitimate Targaryen. There was plenty of evidence in both the books and the TV show. It was subtle and none of the characters had a clue, but the evidence was enough that the audience figured it out years before it was confirmed.
Character of Convenience
I see this happen with side characters, antagonists, and protagonists. Everyone. I see it SO often it makes my eyes bleed. Or it would if eye bleeding was caused by deep, intense frustration. Obviously, this is deeply related to Cause Without Effect.
There’s a genre in manga called isekai which is a specific type of transmigration. Basically, a character is transported from the real world into a fantasy world. It has many clichés , one of which is the villainess trope (don’t get me started on how absurd it is to engender a character role). In this trope a character is isekai’d into the role of a villain in a novel or otome (choose your adventure) game they’ve read/played. The advantage they have is that they know the future, the disadvantage is that they are (usually) destined to die. The stakes are life and death and the challenge is changing fate. Yeah, it’s a good hook.
Unfortunately, this trope tends to implement a lot of assumptive reasoning. Often the main character decides that if they want to avoid death, they should befriend the person that will eventually kill them, usually the protagonist’s love interest (as opposed to the “just don’t do that crazy stuff” strategy that seems obvious and much easier).
So, the writer is being a little lazy here, right? They couldn’t come up with a more compelling cause to push their characters together, so they just . . . made the MC overlook the glaringly obvious.
Furthermore, after the main character has successfully befriended the original protagonist’s love interest and accidentally won their heart, the MC refuses to acknowledge or believe that the love interest is capable of falling in love with them because “that’s not how it happened in the original story.”
Table flip.
What is the cause of this belief? There is literally a pile of evidence to the contrary that the MC has personally created, so why does an otherwise intelligent and reasonable character still believe in this fatalism? This is lazy writing at its worst.
There’s the clever, witty protagonist who can’t recognize the obvious signs of betrayal or love in someone close to them too often. I mean, there’s foreshadowing and then there’s making your characters dumb out of convenience, OK? There’s also the genius who is tricked by misdirection. The villain who is seemingly omnipotent. The cult of zealous followers who have no real reason for any of their actions, let alone for following their leader. Honestly, I wrote a tangent about Voldemort re: cults but deleted it because it was too OT. Instead, check out this post critiquing the logic of Voldemort’s characterization that’s much kinder than I was.
Here’s a shortcut: Good or evil or neutral, all of your primary, secondary, and tertiary characters should reasonably believe the end justifies the means. They should have a reason why they believe that and why they are unflinching in that belief. And their actions should reflect that. Why is your character doing something? Because of a personal motive, not because the plot needs them to. If they don’t have a motive, then you need to give them one.
Didn’t Bother With Research
Does your character fall off a horse? You should research common injuries for that type of fall. If the character that fell sustains an injury that is more or less severe than the reality, anyone that has experience in horse riding will roll their eyes. Is your character a witch? Consider researching paganism, the history of witch hunts, or neopaganism depending on your setting. As in, if I watch one more “good witch” wearing an inverted pentagram (yes, the direction matters!) on TV, I think my head will explode.
This should serve as inspiration rather than being a chore. You might find a great new source of conflict or character enrichment that you’d never considered before. It will certainly keep your audience from getting frustrated, at the very least.
Assumptive Reasoning
Here’s where the leaps can get insidious. Assumptive reasoning is basically an entire stream of logic based on an assumption rather than a fact. This is magical thinking’s twin sister and one of the most embarrassing types of logical leaps you can get caught making. Watch out! There are a few types and they’re all sneaky.
Ignorance of the Other
OMG I do this all the time. I think we all do. Oh, wait, there I go being ignorant again. It’s easy to assume your experience is normal and common, especially if you are white, cis, neurotypical, or any other form of “normal” (ie, culturally dominant). This isn’t the same as bias, which I’ll cover next. It’s ignorance of the other, not rejection of the other.
Otherness. Honestly, I find this term a little offensive, but it was the legit terminology in academia when I was in college, so . . . feel free to offer an alternative. I will happily use it. MW, who you know I am obsessed with, defines otherness as simply “the quality or state of being other or different,” but the reality is that we’re all different. From our genetic makeup to our experiences, we are all different.
Ignorance of the other takes the form of exclusion. In a world that’s eager to be inclusive and so many “others” to include, it’s almost tempting to make a cheat sheet so that you can make sure everyone’s represented. Uhm, but don’t do that. When you force it, it starts to turn into bias, so just don’t.
The point here is that this is assumptive reasoning. The assumption is that most people are like you, or your target market is, at least. The leap is very obvious: they aren’t. As I said above, NO ONE is the same. We can be similar, yes, but it’s better to just take things on a case-by-case basis.
The solution: Don’t assume anything about your audience. Look at the world around you. Open your eyes and really look around. Yes, even at the things that are unfamiliar and different.
Then write what you see. At the very least, try not to homogenize your cast, world, or the reactions and experiences of your characters.
The Bias
Bias itself isn’t a leap in logic, however many leaps are caused by bias. And it’s easily overlooked if you skip a sensitivity read.
I’ll be honest, this won’t keep you from getting traditionally published, so I guess it’s not important if you don’t care about being inclusive. I feel dirty even writing that, but the truth is that most of the gatekeepers of US entertainment fall into a certain type. And unfortunately, even when you endeavor to be woke, it’s hard to notice bias that’s been normalized in your own culture.
These biases are usually based in an -ism. Racism, sexism, nationalism, classism–it’s a long list. Basically, any kind of social bias that we’ve mistaken for fact. We all have them. It’s hard not to. Just like how our brains are wired to categorize things, they are also wired to organize those categories into a hierarchy based on our values. But these biases can be exclusionary and even perpetuate negative stereotypes–and breed hate–so it’s best to be aware of them. In situations like this, it’s important to first forgive yourself for being imperfect and then make amends.
Sadly, I see this so often it’s hard to choose an example. You (sadly) expect to see it in the news, but it’s also all over TV, movies, books . . . well, it’s everywhere.
So, what does it look like? Bias is the black kid that only gets to say a “black” catchphrase every other episode; it’s the girl without any agency because she’s essentially just an object of conquest for the male main character. Did anyone notice when the token black friend became the token gay friend?
Fortunately, there’s a lot of attention on bias right now, as well as the conversation about whether discriminatory inclusion is better than no inclusion. That’s not the point of this postand I’m getting carried away, so I’m not going to go further down that rabbit hole. Maybe later I’ll write a #soapbox.
I’ve tried to keep my example as innocuous as possible: When I was a teenager, I was a goth. I was depressed because I just found out my dad killed himself, I had a dark sense of humor (still do), and was weird enough that I had spent half my life being rejected. I’d gotten tired of trying to fit in–something I’ve never succeeded at–so I started expressing the sense of otherness I felt inside on the outside.
There were a few people who later told me they were afraid of me at the time. They thought I was going to shoot up the school. That I worshiped the devil. One kid even told me they thought I drank blood (in their defense, I wore a vampire costume to school on Halloween once).
Remember, bias is a type of assumptive reasoning. In this story, the bias is that people who are different are dangerous. And the leap in logic is that people BELIEVED those things about me because I wore black. There was literally no other evidence to support those suppositions. I was nice to everyone that was nice to me and I got good grades. I was introverted, but not withdrawn, and though I didn’t smile often, I was never aggressive. I was, in fact, more docile than many of the more “normal” kids my age. If I didn’t dress the way I did, people would have laughed at the kids that were afraid of me.
Catching your own bias is as hard as turning around and looking at your own ass. Fortunately, we have mirrors for that. Always endeavor to be self-aware, critically assess your own suppositions, and when in doubt hire a sensitivity reader.
Look, there are no hard and fast rules in anything creative. I try not to be prescriptive because I consider that kind of rule-making to be exclusionary of things that are new and fresh. There are always loopholes, ways to be flexible. My point here is that if your plot points don’t add up in a logical way, your story is suffering and you need to address it if you want it to be better. Maybe that’s a full rewrite. Maybe it’s just adding in a few details or changing a few causes to make your desired effect more believable. Just pay attention to the causal relationships in your plot when you edit. Find a beta reader. Invest in a sensitivity read. Your work can only improve.
Further Reading
Ta-Da! Magical Thinking Explained
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