CLOSING LOOPS
AKA how to make your plot feel super tight and interconnected so people will think you’re really smart even if you’re three racoons in a trench coat
As a pantser (a writer who makes up their plot as they go) something that never fails to bother me re: the pantsing vs plotting debate is the people who say they can just tell when a book was pantsed because the plot feels convoluted or meandering or any other number of adjectives that basically amount to if you don’t outline your books in advance you are a bad writer who should feel bad.
That’s bull, in my opinion.
Rarely do I speak about writing in absolute terms because most of us have long since realized there is no one way — or indeed, no right way — to write a book. But I am absolutely certain about this: how you write your first draft doesn’t matter. Like, AT ALL. Hell, if chiselling your story into a stone tablet is what it takes to get you to the end, then go forth and chisel, my friend, I’ll lend you Thor’s hammer; he keeps it at my house.
You just need to be aware of how your chosen process affects the end result, and then edit to compensate.
So yeah, that’s my declaration. If a plot feels convoluted, or meandering, or like it was just made up as the writer went along, that’s not a failure of drafting. It’s a failure of editing.
Which is a really long way of introducing this concept I call Closing Loops.
Does it have a real name? Probably. Do I know it? LOL I still don’t know the difference between a noun and an adverb. I leave real names to the pros or steal them off TV. Sometimes, I even name mermaids ‘mermaid’. I am clearly not the authority on names.
This is just what I call it. And I need to call it something because my first drafts are a mess (at the plot level) so I use this technique a lot.
So what does Closing Loops mean?
Well, if you’re a pantser like me, then certain elements of your plot likely started life as whims or bunnies you followed down the rabbit hole as you were drafting.
All of my world building starts out this way, for the record. I tend to write what feels cool in the moment and then go back and make sure it all works and makes sense down the line. This is true for action, too. If I feel like making my main character jump off a building, I will. Then I’ll go back and make sure that not only do they have a good reason for doing it (beyond ‘this is cool as, bro’), but that the world and their backstory supports the fact that they can jump off a building and not, you know, DIE (which is what happens every time I jump off a building).
But what can happen when you work like a chaos demon is that you end up adding plot to plot to plot and so your book becomes a mess of elements that kind of make sense on their own (A leads to B leads to C) but never really pull together as a whole (A feels entirely disconnected from C).
Read: convoluted or meandering.
That’s where Closing Loops comes in.
It’s a simple concept, really, it’s all about looking back at the disparate plot elements you vomited onto the page, and asking yourself: how can I make this feel relevant for more than just this one scene?
Example:
One of my books opens with a mermaid getting taught to drive. And yes, I realise that’s a ridiculous sentence, but go with it, okay? I am mostly ridiculous.
Now, in my first draft, that plot element was 100% window dressing. I wanted a fun scene to open on that allowed me to work in some exposition and banter, and this is what I came up with.
My mermaid did not drive anything in the rest of the book. If you had asked me back then if the driving lesson was plot relevant, I would have giggled nervously and distracted you with a bumblebee.
Fast forward to my edits where my editor asked me to ramp up the tension and pacing in places, and I had to decide how.
I could have easily done this by just adding in a new plot problem, or another shark, or whatever… but that meant work. And I so hate work.
So instead of trying to figure out how to shove in a whole new plot point with all the necessary info required to make it make sense, and all the knock on effects, I decided to look back at my existing plot elements and see if any of them could help me out.
And what do you know… in the first scene, my mermaid was learning to drive! So what if she now had to use that already on the page skill?
Not only did the new car chase (that’s right, I added a mermaid car chase — fight me) fix my tension and pace problem, it connected back to something already in the book, which in turn makes the reader stop and think: oh that’s cool, the thing the mermaid did in chapter 1 is actually useful? Wow isn’t this book clever and tightly plotted?
Some might even say it… closed the loop (yes I am perfectly aware absolutely no one would ever say that. Shut up).
The great thing about closing loops this way is that it’s something you can do multiple times.
My mermaid ended up using her driving skills a second time in the final draft — I had her steal a car towards the end of the second act — because in the service of adding tension and pace, I needed to add yet another plot point (in this case, grand theft auto to escape parental interference), but instead of starting from scratch, I just kept building off that existing element.
So, to recap: in the first draft, my mermaid’s driving lesson was 100% window dressing. Fun, but ultimately pointless.
In the final draft, it is a vital skill that enables her to navigate the plot without the reader stopping to ask: wait a minute, where the hell did a fish learn to drive stick?
And just to bring it back to my opening rant (close the loop, if you will), this is why it doesn’t matter whether you plot your books or pants them. My plot was perfectly functional in the first draft, but it really came alive in edits.
Edits are where the magic happens, folks. You really don’t have to nail everything on the first pass.
As always, the disclaimer with this piece of advice is: you obviously don’t have to close every loop. There is nothing wrong with window dressing, or bit part characters that serve their role and disappear for the rest of the novel. If you try to loop everything back to everything else you’ll likely end up wound tighter than a pretzel.
But if you can get some of your plot elements to pull double duty, it can go a long way to making you appear Very Smart (TM) even though you accidentally brushed your teeth with moisturiser this morning.
*
Found this useful? Be sure to check out my resources page :)
Didn’t find this useful? Well, that’s probably because you’re a mermaid who can’t drive.