Hang a Lantern on Your Plot Problems

Back when I was doing final revisions on my first novel, I found a small plot hole. It was nothing major, but one of my beta readers noticed it (thanks Summer!) and I couldn’t decide what to do about it. It wasn’t a big enough issue that I wanted to rewrite the whole book to make room for it, but I did feel like it need to be addressed. Believe it or not, I found my answer in a book.

I was on vacation a few months before that, reading “Where’d You Go Bernadette” by Maria Semple, and something caught my attention.

No spoilers, because you really should read it – it’s wonderfully charming and funny – but in a letter from one character to another a mom is complaining about her daughter’s school. It’s not the first time this character has voiced dissatisfaction with the school and a reader MIGHT start to wonder why didn’t they just switch schools.

Hang a Lantern on It

To address the “why don’t they change schools” issue, Semple drops this little gem:

So why didn’t I switch schools? The other good schools I could have sent Bee to…well, to get to them, I’d have to drive past a Buca di Beppo. I hated my life enough without having to drive past a Buca di Beppo four times a day.

And then the story moves on. It’s the only mention of Buca di Beppo in the whole book. That’s all the explanation we get – and it totally works. Brilliant. Semple took something that was a bit of a hole and, instead of revamping with long backstory, she just hung a lantern on it, like: yep, that’s there, moving on.

(Side note: my writing buddies and I often use this phrase, “hang a lantern on it,” and I realized when I sat down to write this that I didn’t actually know how it became a thing. I mean, it seems obvious enough – if you hang a lantern on something, you bring light to it – but a quick google search revealed that it became a common turn of phrase in the 1980s when it was used by Chris Mathews, a former chief of staff to Speaker of the House of Representatives, when he suggested that politicians needed to get ahead of bad press by admitting and defining their problems by “hanging a lantern” on them. The Internet said it, so it must be true.)

Turn a Problem into an Asset

Then, I was thinking about those hanging lanterns when I sat down with the kids to watch “Tangled.” For those of you without children, it’s Disney’s take on the Rapunzel story.

The guy who pulls the long-haired princess from her tower is wanted by the local authorities and there must be eight or nine times in the movie where we’re reminded of this fact by a wanted poster. But the poster bit doesn’t feel repetitive because every time we see one, the dude’s nose is different. It becomes a running gag.

What I realized as I was watching it was that the gag completely distracts from the fact that they needed those wanted poster beats in the story, and they would have gotten very boring if the story creators had tried to pretend the repetition wasn’t an issue. Instead, by turning attention toward the posters, they created a story element that worked really well. It’s super silly, and emphasizes the character’s vanity.

Finding Somewhere to Hang My Own Lantern

So I took a lantern to my own story. I found a way to say: “yep, that’s not quite explained in full,” and then moved on (and if you read it and didn’t notice, then I’ll say it was a successful fix – if you haven’t read it: click here.)