One of the things that you have to watch for when you are working on a story that is a continuation from a previous work is continuity, or even within the same story continuity errors can crop up. What do I mean by continuity? If you give your character blue eyes in one book, then you can’t give that same character brown eyes in the next book, unless you are deliberately having the character wear eye changing contacts for a reason integral to the plot. As you are reading this, I know that you’re thinking to yourself, but I would never make that sort of mistake. Believe me, it is much easier than you think to make those sorts of errors. In the world of TV and Films, there are people whose job it is to ensure that all of those details are attended to, and mistakes will still creep in. I’m sure you noticed things when watching one of your favorite TV series.
How do you guard against errors in continuity? A disciplined writer, which I am not, will make a list of all of the characters in the story and jot down all of the things used to describe those characters. Are they short or tall, eye color, hair color, freckles or not? Do they have a preference for a particular type of clothing? What kind of job do they have? Or if in school, what are their classes? If they are a smoker, what is the brand of cigarettes?
Character descriptions and habits are not the only areas where continuity errors can creep in. You also have to think about the setting of the story. If you created an intersection with a stop sign on one part of the story, it can’t be a stop light later on, unless within the context of the story it changes. It is probably the easiest for errors to crop up in the smaller, less significant parts of the story because as you are writing, you might put something down earlier on in the work, while toward the end, you change it because in the context of what you are now writing it makes more sense for it to be something different. Those are also the most difficult things to spot, so make sure you read and re-read your work looking for those types of changes.
Your aim is consistency. The little details all need to be consistent throughout your story or stories, and if there is a change, then it needs to be given significance within the storyline. To give you an example of how easy it is to make continuity errors, I just re-read Misfit McCabe as a part of the editing process to ensure that it flows seamlessly into Nowhere Feels Like Home, and as I reached the part where Katie falls and breaks her ankle, I realized that in Misfit McCabe she broke her left ankle and in Nowhere Feels Like Home, I put the cast on her right leg. So, one of the edits that I went back and made immediately was searching in Nowhere Feels Like Home to find every instance in which I referred to the right ankle being broken and changed it to the left. In my mind when visualizing Katie in a cast, I see it on the right leg, so I will have to change my mental picture. Fortunately, I caught this error during the editing process and was able to change it. And that is the reason editing for continuity is so important.
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Copyright 2009 © LK Gardner-Griffie
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