Continuity Woes

 

Fiction writers who want to keep their readers immersed in the story must pay attention to continuity. That means that plot and description must be consistent so that errors don’t interrupt the story. To give the most commonly used example, a heroine with green eyes in chapter one shouldn’t suddenly have brown eyes in chapter five. If readers notice that, they may not read on to chapter six.

My biggest continuity errors result from changes that occur as I write the story. In Desert Jewels, my protagonist’s name started as Martha and changed to Emi. That sounds simple enough to handle: just use Word’s search and replace function. That was fine when I first made the change. Unfortunately, as I wrote more, I was so used to the old name that it kept creeping into the new material. In the end I did another search on Martha and replaced it with Emi. But if I hadn’t, readers would have been bumped out of the story every time they came across the original name.

Then there are my protagonist’s dresses in Welcome to America. Anne starts the voyage with three dresses, and two of them get stained during the crossing. When Anne arrives at Ellis Island, she is wearing a wool dress that is too hot for the summer temperatures. After I realized that the wool dress was one of the stained ones, I had to go back and rework what she wore when.

In my murder mystery, I rearranged several large chunks of material between the second and third drafts. So it was necessary to catch and eliminate earlier references to events that now occurred later in the story.

Fortunately, I have back-up. If I don’t catch the continuity errors, my critique partner or copy editor will. That’s what happened in the manuscript I just completed, where my copy editor noticed that I had mentioned the Odyssey when I meant the Iliad.

As far as I know, I’ve managed to catch and fix continuity errors before they get embedded in a novel and pull my readers out of the story. Still, if someone does find continuity errors, I wouldn’t be alone. Here are two examples from classic novels:

• In Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Crusoe strips naked to swim to the wrecked ship and retrieve supplies. Yet he somehow manages to have pockets to shove some of those supplies into.
• In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, Dr. Watson’s war wound moves from his shoulder in A Study in Scarlet to his leg in The Sign of Four.

And another from a more recent book:

• In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling, Harry and Hermione leave Buckbeak tied to a tree, but when they return he is tied to a fence.

If you do find continuity errors in my books, at least I’ll be in good company.

But I’d rather it didn’t happen at all.

Matching Names to Characters

 

In Act II, Scene I of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet says “What’s in a name! that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” While that may be true for a rose, it doesn’t work with fictional characters. Readers who hear a name before becoming familiar with the character often form their own ideas about background and personality, so choosing an appropriate name can be crucial to creating the right image.

I’m currently reading Some Die Eloquent by Catherine Aird, and she has a secondary character named Dr. McCavity. He’s a physician rather than a dentist, which would have been too flippant for a mostly serious work. The name does fit him, though, because it makes me think of a buffoon. Dr. McCavity is an alcoholic who keeps running into bollards, those permanent posts that line roads to keep drivers from leaving the roadway. If the name had been given to a strait-laced elderly man, I’m not sure I could have treated the character seriously even if the story called for it.

I always put a lot of thought into choosing character names. The graphic represents a dilemma I had several years ago when I originally selected Warren for my protagonist’s last name. Then I discovered that the book’s locale—Vicksburg, Mississippi—was in Warren County. I didn’t want any of my readers associating my protagonist with a wealthy or important family, so I change her last name to Gibson.

Then there is one of the protagonists of my murder mystery. Victoria McDonald is the victim’s daughter. Her mother was a successful attorney, but she had a tough road reaching that place in her career and her personal life was quiet and unpretentious. So I wanted them to have an ordinary family name that is easy to remember but isn’t showy. McDonald just felt right.

My protagonist’s first name is even more telling. The victim named her daughter Victoria because she wanted her to have a victorious life. But Vic has insecurities and doubts and she doesn’t feel victorious. Since she knows Victoria doesn’t suit her personality, she insists that people call her Vic.

So where do I find my characters’ names? When I’m writing my middle-grade historical novels, I get the first names from lists showing the most common names given to babies born in the same decade as my protagonist. Then I go through the top twenty or thirty to see which one best fits my protagonist. This can be a dangerous approach because readers have various experiences with those names, and someone who remembers a Karen as her best friend will have a very different response than someone who was bullied by a Karen. But unless I want to use names that are cliché (such as using McCavity for a dentist or Candy for a super-sweet girl), it’s a risk I have to take.

Choosing last names is a different process. Yes, I do want family names that create the right image for readers, but it is more complicated than that. If I have an ethnic background in mind for my character, I look for a family name that works with it. And I don’t always use something as common as McDonald. On trips in the U.S., I watch the exit signs while Roland is driving and keep a notebook handy to write down the names of likely-sounding towns. Or I may take a last name from a novel, such as using Gardiner from Pride and Prejudice for one protagonist’s maternal grandmother.

It isn’t easy to pick the right name.

But it is important.

Travel Withdrawal

 

I’m suffering from travel withdrawal. It has been over a year since Roland and I went on our last international vacation. Since then we’ve had to postpone a trip to Africa and another to Australia and New Zeeland, which have been rescheduled for later this year and next spring, respectively. We’re praying that they don’t get postponed again.

In the meantime, I’m reflecting back on our last trip. I never wrote about it on this blog because COVID-19 swallowed up all other news when we returned. So now it’s time to give you a brief overview. We saw too many sights and I took too many photographs to include them all here, so I’ll try to just give you a flavor of each place.

Roland and I flew to Puerto Rico on February 20, 2020 to board a ship for a Viking ocean cruise through the Caribbean and up the Amazon River in Brazil. It was the Amazon River part of the trip that attracted us, but we’ve cruised with Viking before and always had a good experience. We expected this time to be the same, and it was.

Our first stop was in Bridgetown, Barbados, where we took a bus tour of the island. Our second stop was in French Guiana at Ile Royale, which is the largest of the Iles du Salut (Salvation Islands) and used to be the site of a famous French prison.

The first photo below is an evening shot of the Customs Building in San Juan, which was taken from our cabin balcony on the Viking Sea. The second is St. James Parish Church (Anglican), which is the oldest church on Barbados, and the last show some of the flora and fauna on Ile Royale.

Our first stop in Brazil was at the city of Santarem. Next, we anchored at the small town of Parintins, Brazil and attended a performance of a folk musical called Boi Bumba. From there we went to Manaus, Brazil, which is the largest city on the Amazon and is about 1,000 miles up the river.

The first two photos below show the Cathedral of Our Lady of Conception and one of many hammock stalls in the plaza in front of the cathedral at Santarem. The next two are the skyline of Manaus and the Manaus Opera House.

The ship turned around at Manaus. On the return trip down the Amazon, we docked near the colorful fishing town of Belem, Brazil. These photos show the fishing boats at Belem and some of the fish in the market.

While docked at Manaus, we took a small boat excursion up the Rio Negro, which is where we saw the macaw shown in the photo at the head of this post.

After returning to the Caribbean, we stopped at Tobago and then at Saint Lucia. At Saint Lucia we rode an aerial tram through the rain forest and also took a tour of the island. From there, we sailed to St. John’s, Antigua for a bus tour around the island. Our last stop before returning to Puerto Rico was St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. St. Thomas was crowded with cruise ships, and ours was dwarfed by those from other cruise lines. The iguanas sunned themselves on the rocks as they ignored the crowds of tourists.

The next two photos show the aerial tram on Ssint Lucia and a view of Antigua’s English Harbor. The final two are from St. Thomas. See how small our ship is compared to the one next to it.

We returned to Puerto Rico on March 11 and flew home. We had absolutely no issues with COVID-19 on the trip, but when we got to San Juan we discovered that Viking had cancelled all future cruises until further notice. So we felt really fortunate to have gotten our trip in.

And Roland and I are anxiously waiting for the next one.

What a Difference a Year Makes--Or Does It?

 

Last year at this time there were no in-person Easter services or congregational Easter breakfast and my choir was on hiatus. This year was still off. As with last year, there was no Easter breakfast at church. The choir didn’t sing an anthem because our director is recovering from a serious case of COVID-19. But things have improved. We had in-person services and the choir participated by singing a couple of hymn verses.

COVID restrictions are still in place, and I’m not sure what effect they had on attendance. You can see from the photo that family groups are still socially distanced from other family groups and the section on the left-hand side is masked for the entire service. (Everyone is required to wear masks to and from their seats, but the other sections can remove them during the service.) In former times, all of the seats would have been filled at this particular service on Easter instead of having the empty pews in between.

But the real meaning of Easter was the same two years ago and last year and this year and forever. Easter and every other Sunday (and every day) reminds us that Christ died and rose for sinners like us. Like me. As it says in Romans 5:8-11 (NIV):

⁸But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. ⁹Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! ¹⁰ For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! ¹¹Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

__________

I took the picture from the choir loft at the 9:30 a.m. service during the sermon I was hearing for the third time.