Believe it or not...well, you probably do...hehehe, I used to be MUCH worse about story continuity in my own work! I mean, as hard as I tried, it was always a difficult task trying to keep everything all together the way I really wanted to. And that was while I was working with handwritten NOTES to help guide me and keep me on track. (Keep an eye out for my article on personal story notes soon!) But that’s one of the traps of trying to keep all of your story’s details in your head, and attempting to keep writing from beginning to end. Let me tell you…it doesn’t really work like that for most writers. And that’s even if you’re just working on ONE story, much less a variety of different tales of fiction all at once. No matter how much truth there is to the story, or how close the characters may be to your heart and soul...the idea that you can write an entire story of any real length and remember all the details without the occasional slip up here and there, is pretty much unfathomable. If any of you guys know how to do it, please share your magic trick with the group! Because I had to resort to taking enough notes constantly to know where I left off, where it came from, and where I was going with it. I was starting to think that I was going to give myself a full blown brain aneurysm trying to keep everything catalogued in my head somewhere so I’d be able to draw from it when I needed it. Hehehe, but no such luck! I forget to do stuff in my own life sometimes! It’s even harder to remember what’s going on with well over one hundred fictional characters on top of it all. But I can’t stress how important it is to do just that when you’re writing your work out and presenting it in front of you audience. Because the truth is….it can be really confusing for them at best, and extremely annoying at worst. So we all need to make the concept of story continuity a priority at all costs.

I really do believe that everything an author writes should have some kind of ‘flow’ to it in order for it to really work. That’s my opinion, as it just makes for a better reading experience for me. It should be smooth, it should have a certain level of natural momentum, and it should be engaging in a way where it doesn’t feel as though you’re reading words on a page or a screen instead of being a virtual part of the story. When readers get caught up in the flow of what you’re writing, the words almost seem to disappear completely, and their imaginations are left to roam free, creating all of the sights and sounds and feelings in their hearts and minds that you worked so hard to develop with your storytelling ability. You hold them captive in your fictional world. That’s the absolute best feeling in the world. Well, that and sex!

However...when your continuity falls off or goes astray...you create stumbling blocks in that natural flow, and it immediately crashes the immersion of the story itself. As I believe that I’ve said once in the past...the immersion is everything in your fiction. It will forgive all technical and mechanical mistakes, even spelling errors (as long as they’re not TOO excessive) because they just want to pass over it and get back to the story. So these perception stumbling blocks are guaranteed to ruin that experience, and often much faster than you would assume that they ever could. Continuity errors are the absolute worst one of those stumbling blocks that could put a stranglehold on your story. Especially if you continue on with them or that change for any length of time. It can be a very jarring experience for your readers...and not at all in a good way.

It’s almost like telling an outright LIE, you know...and then you build the second half of that story off of that same lie...which does terrible things for the beginning of that particular story. Remember...problems like this force your readers to stop, and readjust and re-imagine your story from scratch. And while they’re doing that...they might be losing interest. Sad, but true. Screw up your continuity, and you could end up causing you story and its fanbase to collapse in a single chapter. Hehehe, so I suggest you try to avoid that.

It’s no reason to panic...just try to fix these issues out in your editing process before releasing it to the public. If you have a good Beta reader on your side...even better! They might be able to catch these things that you might not notice while you’re lost in ‘writer mode’. Listen to their advice. They’re there to help you out. Stay focused.

And if you post or publish with these mistakes included before you’re able to catch them...then you might just have to take a big loss on that, and fess up to your mistake while you keep moving forward. There’s really not much else that you can do. ‘Fix it in post’, as the movie folks say.

The easiest part of going back to correcting continuity errors is simply a name change or change in spelling. Something that I have been absolutely HORRIBLE about in some cases, until recently, now that I’m trying to fix everything up for the ebooks! I can’t even tell you why. It’s like my brain sees things one thing on one day, but it sees something else completely different the next day. This something that I’ve really been working on when I’m writing, and I definitely look for in my ebook versions so I can make sure that I can keep everything consistent. Like I said, I didn’t even realize that I was flipping and flopping back and forth with the spelling of my own characters’ names until I went back to edit the story for the third or fourth time. And I cringed every single time. Lesson learned!

For example, the main character in my story “My Only Escape” (https://gayauthors.org/story/comicality/myonlyescape). Sometimes I was spelling it ‘Zach’ with an ‘H’...and other times, I was spelling it with a ‘K’, which is what I had originally intended. So I made sure to go through all of the books in the entire completed ebook series to have everything line up like it should. Also, there was a character that I created in the “Shelter” prequel, “Rotting Apples” (https://gayauthors.org/story/comicality/rottingapples/) who later whows up in the main story of “Shelter” (https://gayauthors.org/story/comicality/shelter/) and his name kept changing from ‘Stephen’ to ‘Steven’, and that’s still something that I have to fix as of right now on the site to keep from embarrassing myself even further. I really REALLY hate doing that! It’s such an amateur mistake, but sometimes, it’s just unavoidable. The idea is to catch it in the editing process before anybody else gets to see it.

Hehehe, obviously, I didn’t! So, I suck for that! Sorry. But I’d like to think that I’m getting better at looking for these kinds of mishaps!

That might seem like such a minor thing and an easy fix...but it counts. Why? Because it’s interrupting the natural flow of my story, and it’s a stain on my brand as an attentive author who’s always trying to put his best foot forward.

Do you see it? Can feel it? That stumble can toss even the most invested reader out of my carefully crafted world and sends them crashing back down to Earth again. I don’t want that.

Now….let’s move onto something a bit more detrimental a story’s continuity. And that is the plot and intimate details of the story itself. This is where an author can really cause a significant amount of damage to what they’re doing. Where your only choices are to completely re-edit everything out, try to find a way to weave the differences together in a way that explain what happened...or to totally ‘cheat’ and pretend it never happened at all. Hehehe, to anyone who’s read all of my stories, then you’ll already know that I’m guilty of doing all three! So you make your own choices where you feel you need to...but here has been my pseudo-expert experience so far.

When I started my very first story on the site, “New Kid In School” (https://gayauthors.org/story/comicality/newkidinschool), I was much younger and a complete novice at writing these kinds of stories. Or anything even remotely gay, to be honest. My only way of trying to openly express myself in that way came from following the Nifty Archives’ blueprint to get started...and I made my main characters really YOUNG. When I started, Randy and Ryan were only thirteen years old. And as I continued to write on (I never really expected my very first story to go anywhere after that first chapter) they were aged up to high school age, and then Ryan was taking driving lessons...meaning that they were now sixteen at least. Unfortunately, it was too late to go back and correct that error on Nifty, even if I fixed it on my own site. But they were still supposed to be new boyfriends, so I couldn’t just magically say that they had been together for three whole years and the gap in time had just whizzed by without anybody noticing. Not their friends or their parents or anything. So that huge time gap still exists in the story and probably always will until I turn it into an ebook series and start all over from scratch. It’s a continuity error that makes me cringe every time I think about it. And anybody reading it is going to know the glaring difference between the earlier chapters and the later chapters. That continuity in my storytelling is just going to have to remain forever broken until I start all over again. You know? Shame, shame, shame.

There have been other mistakes where I’ve accidentally called a character by the wrong name and didn’t catch it in editing. Where blue eyes turn brown or hazel. There was a time in “A Class By Himself” (https://gayauthors.org/story/comicality/aclassbyhimself) where in an earlier chapter, Derrick couldn’t afford to just ‘go out and buy a new laptop’ which put him at a severe disadvantage from the other students in his class...but in a later chapter he was getting emails or texts from his boyfriend Tanner without explaining how he was able to suddenly afford the equipment to be able to do that. There is an entire treasure trove of mistakes and inconsistencies in my work that I’ve really had to work hard to not draw attention to and hope that I can somehow keep writing and moving the story forward from when I discovered the continuity mishap in the first place. I just wish I was able to catch it ahead of time.

I was lucky enough to get a second chance to make a first impression with my work by painstakingly going through my stories and correcting these mistakes before releasing them as ebooks, where they’ve found a whole new life with a much better and mature and experienced version than what I originally released anywhere else online. (https://imagine-magazine.org/store/comicality/) So...like, in the original “Gone From Daylight”, I had a group of people go off to speak in private on a rooftop one night. One of those characters was named, ‘Doc’, who I wanted to be there because of his knowledge and studies of what was going on. But, he’s in a wheelchair...so how did he get to the rooftop? In the original version, I wasn’t thinking about that. I just wanted him there in the scene. In the ebook version, I created an entire scene of an old elevator with my main character and his boyfriend getting him to the top of that building. And that part of the story make much more sense now, and doesn’t act as a stumbling block to anybody enjoying the natural flow of the story and don’t have to stop and readjust to question what’s going on and why. Now that I’m able to look back and act on that whole ‘hindsight is 20/20’ principle...I can smooth out all of the rough edges and work towards creating a work of fiction that makes sense. And one that won’t confuse my readers with continuity errors.

Don’t end up with the kind of regrets that I have from not being more careful when I started. You have a chance to get it right the first time, and put that best foot forward with confidence and advice that will save you from some of those pitfalls that I had to experience by getting it wrong. K?

That’s it for now! Go out there and show the world what you’ve got! Just make sure that you keep your story focused and as void of those continuity wormholes as you possibly can. They’re easy to fall into, and very hard to get out of! So skip that part of you writer’s journey at all costs.

Seezya soon! Happy writing! And stay beautiful!