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.