Continuity Gremlins
Reading aloud is something Kent does a lot of. At the end of each work session he offers a dramatic reading of the newly composed prose, which faithful readers already know. But he also reads to Jen while she cooks dinner. It’s his version of singing for his supper. Earlier this week we came to the end of the current read-aloud, and decided that instead of choosing something from our Shelf of Unread Books, we’d dive in and read through our work in progress.
Still Untitled Ghost Novel #1 is currently a hair shy of 35,000 words. That’s 65 pages single-spaced!
The first reading of a work in progress is, for us anyway, a real treat. It’s gratifying to see (or hear) how far we’ve come, and how well the pieces fit together. Of course, it’s not always perfect. There are a few times where our characters start talking about an item or event like the reader already knows a lot about it, when the reader will actually know nothing about it because we invented it. So we’ll need to flesh those spots out. And the opposite is true, too, where more than one character provide Intro to Subject X lessons. We’re making notes about those sorts of things, and we’ll fix them up later.
Where we’re noticing actual inconsistencies is in the descriptions of our main location. It’s a complicated, fancy place that we made up, and it’s a bit of a challenge to make the description of what’s in Jen’s head match up with the description of what’s in Kent’s head. We have a real-world inspiration site to draw from, and a Kent-drawn map to refer to, and we’re still not entirely lined up. We’re tripping over the details.
We have a pretty rigid prewriting process, and by the time we get to the actual composition part of writing, we know a lot of how it’s going to go. No matter how much we plan, though, there are always details we don’t know we need until we’re in the thick of things. Sometimes we’ll call a time-out and have a discussion, but we only like to do that when it’s a big deal, something that could impact the plot. If we paused for every minor thing we’d have no writing momentum and we’d probably end up killing each other. So we trust each other to make command decisions on the little things, and most of the medium things, too. Usually it works out great. When Kent reads that day’s work aloud at the end of the session, we both make note of the new details and work with them going forward. For instance, if one of us has placed a clever bit of statuary, or described the hidden panel that controls the mood lighting in a certain chamber, then they’re canon. Provisional canon, at least. This is still a first draft! We mostly just scroll back through the manuscript to look up what’s been established, but we also keep printouts of that map handy, so we can add stuff, move stuff, and make rambling notations about stuff.
A writing partner is someone who provides another set of eyes. Sometimes that means they help you spot inconsistencies. Sometimes it means they’re seeing a different picture. A good writing partner is someone whose sky is generally the same color as yours.