Every writer knows the sinking feeling: your protagonist reaches the climax, makes their crucial decision, and suddenly readers are pointing out that this choice completely contradicts everything established in Act One. Or worse—the ending technically works, but feels hollow because your hero's transformation doesn't align with the character type you've been writing all along.

Here's what most writing advice won't tell you: plot holes and logical inconsistencies at story conclusions usually aren't logic problems at all. They're character resonance failures—and there's a specific technique to fix them before they happen.

The Character Echo Audit: Where Save the Cat Meets Resonance Theory

The Character Echo Audit is a pre-ending diagnostic tool that maps your protagonist's journey against both their core archetype and what I call their "resonance frequency"—the emotional wavelength established in your opening that must harmonize (not necessarily repeat) in your conclusion.

Here's why this matters: Blake Snyder's Save the Cat identifies character types like the Fool Triumphant, the Everyman, or the Chosen One. But these archetypes come with built-in trajectories that create reader expectations. When your ending violates these trajectories without proper frequency modulation, you don't just disappoint readers—you create actual logical gaps they'll perceive as plot holes, even if the events technically make sense.

The technique works in three specific phases:

Phase 1: Frequency Capture (conduct this during revision, before writing your ending)

Phase 2: Trajectory Mapping (identify your character type's natural conclusion path)

Phase 3: Resonance Reconciliation (either adjust the ending or retroactively plant frequency harmonics)

Let me show you exactly how this works.

Phase 1: Frequency Capture—Finding Your Character's Opening Note

Go back to your first 15% (roughly 50 pages in a novel, 15 minutes in a film). You're looking for three specific data points:

- The Stasis Emotion: What emotional state defines your protagonist before the inciting incident? Not their situation, but their emotional frequency. Cynical? Naive? Grief-stricken? Overconfident?

- The Competence Baseline: In their ordinary world, are they skilled but blocked, unskilled but eager, or skilled and unaware they're skilled?

- The Agency Pattern: Do they make things happen, do things happen to them, or do they react to protect their status quo?

Write these down explicitly. These three elements create your character's opening resonance frequency—the "note" your story begins on.

Phase 2: Trajectory Mapping—What Your Archetype Promises

Now identify your Save the Cat character type and map its natural trajectory against your frequency capture. This is where most plot holes actually originate.

For example, the Fool Triumphant archetype (think Forrest Gump, Amélie) has a specific trajectory: they succeed because of their perceived weakness, not despite it. Their opening frequency typically shows low competence but high agency—they actively engage with the world in unconventional ways.

If you've written a Fool Triumphant but your ending has them succeed through conventional means or by becoming traditionally competent, you've created what readers will perceive as a plot hole. They'll say things like "Why didn't they just do that earlier?" or "This doesn't make sense with who they are."

The Everyman in Extraordinary Circumstances (Die Hard, The Hunger Games) has a different trajectory: average competence forced into high agency by circumstances, with their stasis emotion usually being "reluctant" or "content in limitations." Their ending must show them choosing engagement rather than being forced into it—but still using ordinary-person solutions.

Here's the critical insight: If your ending solution would have worked in Act One, you have a plot hole, regardless of how clever the plot mechanics are.

Phase 3: Resonance Reconciliation—Harmonizing Without Repeating

This is where the technique gets surgical. You're not trying to make your ending repeat your opening (that's stagnation). You're creating harmonic resonance—like how a C note and a G note sound related even though they're different.

Take your three frequency markers from Phase 1 and ask:

For Stasis Emotion: Does my ending emotion harmonize with the opening? (Naive → Wise harmonizes; Naive → Cynical creates dissonance without intermediate frequency shifts)

For Competence Baseline: Has competence evolved along a logical spectrum, or did it jump? (Unskilled → Skilled-with-scars harmonizes; Unskilled → Master creates gaps)

For Agency Pattern: Does the final act of agency feel like an amplified version of their opening pattern, or a contradiction of it?

If you find dissonance, you have two options:

1. Adjust the ending to create better harmonic resolution
2. Plant frequency modulation scenes in Act Two that gradually shift the resonance

The Technique in Action: A Concrete Example

Let's say you're writing a thriller. Your protagonist is a cautious accountant (Everyman archetype). In Act One, you establish:

- Stasis Emotion: Anxiety about taking risks
- Competence Baseline: Highly skilled at detail work, incompetent at improvisation
- Agency Pattern: Reactive—waits for problems to come to him

You've written an ending where he improvises a daring bluff to outsmart the villain. Readers might call this a plot hole ("Why can he suddenly think on his feet?"), but it's actually a resonance failure.

The Character Echo Audit reveals: You need either (A) an ending where he wins through meticulous preparation and detail-work (harmonizing with his competence baseline), or (B) you need to plant three scenes in Act Two where he's forced into progressively larger improvisations, each time surprising himself—gradually shifting his frequency from "incompetent improviser" toward "reluctant but capable improviser."

Option A maintains perfect resonance. Option B creates harmonic progression—different from the opening note, but audibly related.

Notice this isn't about plot logic—his improvisation might be perfectly logical. It's about character frequency. When that frequency jumps without modulation, readers perceive discontinuity as plot holes.

Why This Solves "Unfixable" Logical Problems

The Character Echo Audit works because most conclusion-based plot holes aren't actually about causality—they're about character trajectory violations that our brains interpret as logical failures.

When a character acts "out of character" in the climax, readers backwards-engineer reasons it shouldn't work, finding plot holes that might not technically exist. Fix the resonance, and those phantom plot holes vanish.

This is especially powerful for revision. Instead of adding more plot explanation (which often makes things worse), you're adjusting emotional and behavioral frequencies to create natural harmony between beginning and ending.

The next time you're facing reader feedback about plot holes in your conclusion, try the Character Echo Audit. You might discover your plot was always sound—it was your character's resonance frequency that needed tuning.