Your Plot Shouldn't Rely on Miscommunication

We've all seen this story before. Two characters (best friends, a couple, business partners, the arrangement doesn't matter) find themselves at odds over a rather small but embarrassing misunderstanding. Maybe the fiancé thinks her husband-to-be is cheating on her with his secretary due to suspicious-looking-but-innocent circumstantial evidence. Perhaps a co-owner of a business thinks his partner is undermining him, when in fact he's trying to save their bottom line. The list goes on and on, but whether it's a mystery, a detective story, or one of the dozens of romantic or comedic plots out there, we've all seen some version of this story.

And it's a very shaky foundation to build an entire novel on.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up, Becky!

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A 5-Minute Conversation Can't Carry a 200-Page Book

A common term for the situation in question is an idiot plot, best described as, "A plot that only happens because everyone involved is an idiot." After all, miscommunications happen in life, and people sometimes get the wrong idea about a situation. And when that happens there may be some immediate tension, and an awkward conversation that needs to be had to fix it.

The point, however, is that if you can fix a problem with a simple explanation, that really isn't something strong enough to hang your whole book on.

Okay, this is embarrassing, but I love you, so let me lay it all out for you...

Now, for clarity, this does not apply to situations where a person can't explain what's going on. For example, if you're writing a spy novel where part of the story is the spouse who's an intelligence operative keeping the nature of their work a secret (True Lies, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, etc.), that isn't the situation we're talking about. We're also not talking about situations where someone is deliberately lying, even if the reason they're lying is stupid. We're talking about a storyline where, rather than just asking what's going on and being honest with one another, characters just make assumptions, and cling to them no matter how obviously, ridiculously wrong they are.

As a subplot, or as a part of a larger story, you can get away with this. However, the miscommunication needs to facilitate a larger part of the plot. If it leaves someone emotionally vulnerable to make a poor decision before it can be explained, for example, then that is a functional use of this trope. But if the whole plot is, "I caught you in what looked like a compromising position with a co-worker/personal trainer/ex, and I left before you could explain things to me," that's not a load-bearing hook.

Especially if your whole cast has to keep making objectively dumber and dumber decisions to keep the charade going, instead of just laying out what happened over coffee and wrapping up the plot by chapter three.

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