Thoughts on Writing
#30: Continuity Trapper Keeper
by Seanan McGuire
This is definitely one of those that needs a little expansion before it
starts making sense. Here you go:
If you're writing any sort of series, whether it be a series
of short stories or a series of novels, you need a continuity guide.
The format is up to you. The level of detail is up to you. But believe
me, even if you somehow manage to forget that your
hero has green eyes and turn them hazel, your readers won't, and they
will eat your soul.
When I was a kid, I found continuity errors unbelievably offensive. If I
could always remember your main character's favorite sandwich,
childhood pet, and preferred route to the spooky old house on the top
of the hill, why couldn't you, the author, remember
the same things? You created them!
Ah, the innocence of youth. Let's talk continuity, why it matters, and
how to maintain it. Ready? Good. Let's begin.
What Is Continuity?
Continuity is, at its simplest, the art of making sure that everything
continues to make linear sense (unless it's not supposed to). Our days
will generally come with their own built-in continuity. We eat
breakfast after we wake up, and generally after we get out of bed. If
we put on a green shirt in the morning, it's not going to be a red
shirt in the evening unless something got spilled, and even then,
linear time doesn't allow for skipping that boring "changing your
shirt" scene. Natural hair colors change gradually over time (as small
children age, or as dark hair starts to silver); unnatural hair colors
happen very suddenly with, again, a scene of transition. Things change
in a sensible, followable manner.
When you're dealing with a work of fiction—any form of
fiction, from comic strips to full-length Hollywood
movies—continuity isn't nearly so effortless. The original Superman
actually had someone on the crew whose entire job was to review the
various scenes and make sure Superman's, ah, um, yeah was always
"tucked" in the same direction, because those tights let you see everything.
Visual productions will generally have multiple people responsible for
watching the continuity, making sure that props don't move
mysteriously, that actors wear the same clothing from scene to scene,
and that things are basically realistic enough to let you deal with the
innate unreality of the movie.
(One of my favorite continuity errors is in one of my favorite movie
musicals of all time, Little Shop of Horrors.
Towards the end of the movie, Audrey is attacked by Audrey II, and
rather vigorously gnawed on. When Seymour pulls her out of the plant
and out of the flower shop, you can see the blood staining her wedding
gown, since that plant has a lot of teeth. Audrey
trips and falls out of the frame, and when Seymour pulls her back into
the frame, the blood is gone. This little continuity glitch is an
artifact of the film's new ending, which differs dramatically from the
ending of the stage show. Oops!)
Sadly, most authors don't have a team of continuity-checkers standing
by to make sure they always remember the color of the hero's shirt,
where the heroine parked her car, or how many bats were described as
being part of the giant swarm. It's all going to be on you, and that
can be a hell of a lot harder than you think it is.
Well, Why Can't the Author Always Remember?
We begin with a confession:
My first published work of novel-length fiction, Rosemary and
Rue, will be coming out released in September of 2009. Now,
the process of producing the book people will eventually be able to
take off the shelf and hold in their hands began with writing the
original draft (naturally). After that came several full revisions as I
worked to chase down and hammer-smack continuity problems, and then
came several rounds of smaller corrections. Finally, I got to sit down
with the final page proofs and make any corrections I thought were
necessary before the book went to print.
Almost all the corrections I made—after revising each page a
minimum of ten times—were continuity corrections.
I know what Toby looks like. I know what she likes and dislikes, what
colors she's inclined to wear, and where the majority of her scars are
located. I can write her accurately—which is to say,
"behaving like a cranky half-human, half-fae private detective who'd
really rather not be here today"—under almost any conditions
you can name. Toby on a submarine? Sure. Toby goes to space? Okay. Toby
gets called for jury duty? You got it. I can't promise that every
possible scenario would be fun to write, or fun to read, but I could
definitely write it. Most authors are going to be like that with any
major protagonist they work with, and even with a lot of their minor
characters. We create these people. We know them. So we should know
their continuity better than anybody else alive, right?
Uh, yeah. Not so much. See, it's that very "after revising each page a
minimum of ten times" that kills us. The book you read once, we write
multiple times, sometimes even several dozen times, and that doesn't
really take into consideration the plotting phase, or whether the book
is part of an ongoing series. (Series can tangle your continuity worse
than damn near anything else. Don't believe me? Ask somebody to explain
the X-Men to you sometime. Watch the heads start to explode.)
Over the course of a single novel, I have to keep track of where Toby
is, what she's doing, how she got there, who's there with her, whether
or not she's been injured recently, whether or not she's eaten
recently, and half a dozen other factors—all without really
factoring in oh, I don't know, a little thing people like to call "the
plot." The color of Toby's borrowed tank top is really not a priority.
It doesn't help that sometimes, authors work themselves into
metaphorical corners, and have to go back and basically rip out twenty
or thirty pages before starting over. Now we have not only the new,
"official" reality in our heads, we have the out-dated, now-alternate
reality jangling around in there. The average author's brain is
cluttered with continuity that's been discredited because it just never
made it onto the page. Sure, we'll probably catch the really big stuff,
like the characters that didn't exist before or the giant sinkhole in
the middle of what used to be downtown, but will we remember the sudden
Pop-Tart break on page forty-seven?
A lot of people call the act of taking old continuity and making it
invalid, or inserting new continuity into old text, the "retcon,"
standing for "retroactive continuity." The sudden inclusion of Dawn
Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a great
example of the retcon at work. Once she exists, all the stories that
came before her change...and some of them change in ways that should
make the world as we know it a very different place.
Continuity is dangerous stuff. Handle with care.
Caution: Continuity At Work.
So how do you keep from forgetting the things you're most likely to
forget—the little things that will wind up mattering hugely
to the people who read your work, but which can fall out of your head
the minute you move on to the next chapter?
Well, the first, and most obvious solution is to write everything down.
Problem: you've already done that, and you're still not remembering
everything. So clearly, you need to create a continuity guide for
yourself. Now, I'm not going to tell you how your continuity guide
should be formatted, because what works for me is unlikely to be a
perfect fit for you. Some people do lists of vital statistics, followed
by notes on character quirks and background facts. Others may just have
one- or two-page character profiles, expanding them as necessary. It's
very personal.
I tend to start out with lists of vital statistics, followed by short
backgrounds and lists of skills, and then expand as necessary. I don't
force things to stick to a tight, specific format, because that way
lies madness, and losing things. My character profile for a character
who shows up in book two, dies in book two, and never comes back, may
be less than a page. My character profile for Toby—who
appears in every book, does a lot of things, and has a lot of personal
details to keep track of—is five pages long, and includes a
personal timeline. I recommend going with whatever works best for you.
The second, and equally vital solution is simple: read your own work.
I'm serious. Before I started reviewing the Rosemary and Rue
page proofs, I sat down with a galley, and read the whole thing from
cover to cover. That both reminded me of "when I was," continuity-wise
(the "oh, yeah, that hasn't happened yet" moment), and helped me see
the continuity errors that already existed in the book. I'll be
re-reading Rosemary as well as A Local
Habitation before I sit down with the page proofs for book
two, and so on. Now, if your continuity is good enough, you may not
need to read the entire series for every new book...but it's still a
good idea to read them all occasionally, just to be sure. Remember,
reading your own work isn't egotism, it's quality control.
Finally, acknowledge that you're going to miss things, because your
head is going to wind up very cluttered with spindrift and nonsense and
other things that didn't make the page. Yes, you're eventually going to
get that reader mail asking how you could be dumb enough to miss the
fact that you said so-and-so was allergic to watermelon six books ago,
and now she's chowing down on the stuff during the big State Fair
sequence in book seven. You're going to be human, just like everybody
else. If you can keep your errors to a watermelon-allergy level, and
not let them surge forward into "oops, I forgot I killed that guy,"
you're going to be doing pretty well.
Take deep breaths, take good notes, and keep your continuity guide as
up-to-date as you can. And remember, we're all going to make mistakes.
We just need to do our best to make them as minor as we can.
© 2011 Seanan McGuire
Seanan McGuire is an author, poet, and musician who lives in the San Francisco Bay area with two cats and a small army of plush dinosaurs. She has recorded two albums, Stars Fall Home and Red Roses and Dead Things, and has published five novels. In 2010, she was awarded the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in the field of science fiction and fantasy.
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