Years ago, Lord, how many years ago, in what seems another lifetime, I and a few of my rock-climbing mates were hired to be ‘extras/live action’ in a documentary being produced on a beautiful and little-known montaine area called Hogsback. It’s a higher piece of the long range that fringes the hot, sere, bleak thorn-scrub Fish River valley-plain. It catches the rain that misses the surrounding semi-desert and is cool, damp and heavily forested. Snowy in winter, and with no natural grazing: Terrible for cattle, impossible for most hunting, so never much populated. It looks a bit like Tolkien might have written it.
Our job was to hike along through the forest, laden with ropes, clanking with climbing gear, clattering with carabiners, slings and everything short of a pair of wings – sort of like Orcs, I suppose, because the racket was anything but tranquil. Then we had to lay siege to the vertical lichen AKA cliff and walk back, tired and triumphant past various waterfall and beautiful prospects. The latter two, of course, were nowhere near the actual walk-down… so they filmed them first.
The crew had, besides the camera crew, and director and his secretary… a pair of “continuity girls” – who reduced the orcs to tears of laughter just by being. They wore cowboy hats, tight jeans (Long before ‘stretch’ denims), high-heeled boots, and impeccable makeup and bouffant improbably blond hair – city women dressed for the ‘country’. No one explained mud to them. Or, for that matter golden-orb-web spiders… or creepy-crawlies (which abound in this part of Mirkwood), or such things as moss and the way it doesn’t stay on the rocks when you stand on it.
They were the best part of the entire experience… but I stray from my brief. Their job was to make sure that, while we did things totally out of the movie sequence, our appearance did not betray this. Ok, any of you vaguely familiar with muddy forests and wet, grungy cliffs of rotting rock carpeted with three-inch-long lichen, can please stop laughing before you die. By day three — when we apparently walked in for 10 minutes, and then ascending the mountain with grace and charm of an Ibex, instead of four hours of vertical jungle-bashing, in which the mountaineers had to eventually carry the camera-gear and then continuity girls and the director, their make-up was ruined and so was any hope of continuity. The climbing – largely thrutching and grunting up a cloaca of a crack – where all they got to see was flailing feet and showers of dislodged lichen, may have dis-enchanted them a little too, but the worst for them was the fact the bedraggled climbers, whose carefully chosen and curated outfits now looked like ghillie-suits, worn by someone who had been dragged through a bush backwards and had a fight they’d lost in muddy pig-pen… and they had hours of footage of our well-dressed, clean ‘return’.
Continuity – especially in the computer age, is a cow for writers too. What brought this to mind was listening to the audio-book of THE WARLOCK IN SPITE OF HIMSELF – Christopher Stasheff – a book I had uncritically enjoyed as teenager. Between then and now, I started writing myself. And once you start looking at books through a writer’s lens, much of the uncritical pleasure is something you can never go back to. I kept hitting continuity errors. Now, I will say that as teen reader I glossed over these. A writer is a terrible critic, and probably a poor judge of what people enjoy, not typical of your average reader. I extend this to a lot of editors, agents, and even ‘super-readers’. That said: continuity errors are very hard for the author to pick up, and can really throw your reader off, and possibly out of the book entirely. The book I mentioned — the whole reason for the battle for control of Gramarye is for the espers who can provide telepathic communication to galactic civilization…making its human capital irreplaceable and valuable. Then the hero’s robot companion transmits on human thought-wave frequency to the telepathic heroine…
Look, I still enjoyed the book. If I enjoy a book despite things that throw me out the author is doing just fine. My point is I that I can’t guarantee that I will be that author and do just fine – and I DO jump to-and-fro. I write time-lines for myself, I make a lot of notes. I have a bunch of wonderful first readers. I still slipped up in CLOUD-CASTLES.
So: how do you keep continuity straight? I’m up for any ideas that don’t involve me wearing high-heeled boots and make-up – especially on a muddy bush track.
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “Continuity”
A character list, terms list (which doesn’t always save me), and a subconscious that likes to hit me with the problem two days after I finish a section. Followed by beta readers who flag what I didn’t catch.
And still things creep (or leap) in.
You mean like:
I guess I’m handling it OK. But that’s what I’ve caught. Who knows what else is lurking in there?
This writing thing is far more fun than I expected, but the pitfalls!
One of my/our writer friends recommends it as a valid use for AI. She has a local version of AI (so it doesn’t feed her books into the giant maw of the AI), and she lets it read her manuscript and give her the character names and descriptions among other things that could glitch continuity especially in a long series of books.
Sorry, I’m too lazy to remember which of the many writers I follow did this and am too lazy to research it since I value ideas more than their sources. Seems like I could use AI to supplement my porous brain. 🙂
Think Sarah Hoyt does a version of this.
And my first guess was you. See how bad my memory is?
I am working on it, but I think Sarah got there first.
“Then the hero’s robot companion transmits on human thought-wave frequency to the telepathic heroine…”
I remember, vaguely. But it didn’t bother me at the time. I didn’t say “hey wait a second, if the robot can do it, what do we need the humans for?” Valid point though.
Continuity is pretty much down to memory for me, and looking things up. Example, Alice Haddison has “one eye of darkest brown and one of lightest gray” but I can never remember left or right, so every book I must look it up. Cut and paste can be so handy.
Continuity about who knows what when, I decided the Valkyries/robot-girlfriends are all on the same network and therefore all share the same memory space. Therefore everybody knows what Alice had for lunch whether they were present or not, and I don’t have to worry about continuity. So convenient.
In current WIP, Hela, the monarch of the underworld, knows the hearts of men. So I don’t have to worry about it. She knows everything. Sometimes she pretends surprise, so as not to be annoying in polite company. She’s thoughtful that way.
At some point I may be forced to make a series bible, but so far I’m doing alright. Brain hasn’t gone soft yet.
Well, the robot can communicate with human telepaths, but the robot’s transmissions only propagate at light speed, not instantaneously. That’s how I’d handle it, anyway.
Scrivener file (folder) set up to track characters, places, and background resources.
And Aeon Timeline to track time between events to ensure the characters present at the scene could reasonably be there. It also has the capacity to create mindmaps, showing the relationships between characters, places, etc.
If the character is already frowning, her frown should deepen, not occur, in the next paragraph.
sigh. Today I hunt down references to the characters’ working magic so I can work out their favorite attack spells and put them in the scene.
Hammerspace isn’t just for cartoons. Aragorn & co’s horses disappear on the trip through the caves of the dead, then reappear when they need to charge from the decks of the ships. Where does Samwise keep a kettle and a frying pan?
You’re remembering the movie, not the book: