It Was the Middle One

What do you do when you realize that your work in progress contains a continuity glitch? Well, that depends on the situation. If you’re Rune Skelley, and the glitch is that a locale gets described differently in different scenes, then it goes something like this, or at least this is how it went in this specific case.

We saw two paths before us. On one hand, we could decide how the place looks and make the fixes before moving on, because that way we’d have a clear, shared image to call up the next time that locale gets used. On the other hand, we could just leave it marked and worry about it later, because future scenes might raise plot points that dictate new or different details of the locale anyway.

In the end, we chose yet another path. (A writing partner is someone who brings two more “other hands” to these situations.) This path goes right up the middle. What we’ll actually do is decide — provisionally — what the correct description is, and make careful notes about it. Perhaps even draw a map, which is something we probably should have done before. But we will leave the existing scenes alone for now and save the corrections for later. Going forward, we will each have a clear image as a touchstone, and we shouldn’t stray from it without a good reason. But if we find a good reason, we can stray away without feeling like we wasted time on edits that are now out-of-date.

A writing partner is someone who helps you figure out how to split the difference.