Why long stories break in the seams, and how to check for it

Most continuity errors are not in a sentence. They are between two sentences that are two hundred pages apart.

A character is on a ferry in chapter four and in a kitchen on the island in chapter four, a few lines later, because you moved a scene in the second draft. Someone names the writer of a letter in chapter five and learns who it was in chapter seven. A storm is over before it began. Each scene is fine alone. The fault is in the relation.

Why editing misses them#

Editing reads forward. You check a paragraph against the paragraph before it, and your memory does the rest, so the longer the book the more it relies on a memory that is wrong in the same places each time: the parts you rewrote. Beta readers catch some, usually the loudest. The rest wait for a reviewer.

A short list of kinds of seam#

Almost every error of this kind is one of a few:

• In two places at once. A character in two scenes that overlap, at different places.
• Too fast. A journey that takes less time than the way allows.
• After the end. Someone who died, back in a present-day scene.
• Before the beginning. Someone in a scene before they were born.
• Out of order. Times that circle: A is after B, B is after C, C is after A.
• Knowing too early. A scene that uses a fact the character has not learned yet.
• One object, two places. The only key, in two pockets.
• The wrong day or the wrong weather. A Tuesday that the calendar says is a Sunday; sun and rain in the same harbour at once.

Notice what these have in common: they are rules over facts, not over prose. If you know where each character is and what they know at each moment, a program can check all of them.

The cost is the facts#

That is the catch. The facts have to exist somewhere. A spreadsheet of who is where is out of date by chapter five, because it is a second job. The only version that survives is one where the facts come from something you were doing anyway.

Author makes that trade explicit. You write scenes. After each, you mark what happened in it that changes someone: a journey, a reveal, an injury. Those events, plus the facts of your cast, are the facts. The state of a character at any moment is then worked out, not recorded, and the checks run on the same facts.

What you get for it#

Two things. First, answers: where is she at the end of chapter nine, what does she know, what changed between chapters five and nine and why. Second, a short list of seams with the rule that broke, the scenes involved and a button to jump to the first one.

It is not magic. If you never mark that Ilse learns the secret, no check can notice a scene that uses it. The checks are only as good as the events, and the events are only as good as the habit of adding them when the scene is fresh.

A cheap way to start#

Take one subplot, the one you most fear contradicting itself. Mark its events only. Run the checks. You will find one or two real seams, and you will see whether the habit is worth extending.