We were watching a very low budget B movie last Saturday night on Svengoolie when the female protagonist, all torn and tattered from being stranded in a lost world for several weeks, was about to get eaten by a plant. The next cut showed the girl in perfectly pressed clothes, no rips or tears, the same shot used at the beginning of the movie. This is a continuity problem. It’s when you notice an unbuttoned jacket in one scene and it’s buttoned in the next shot. Or empty glasses on a table in one shot, then the turnaround shot, they are full. Oops.
I like getting things right. So, when telling a story, I want to make sure the ages are right, the dates are right, and the facts are accurate. I even want to get the private jet flight times right. Yes, this is fiction, but not science fiction with time travel (though I may try a story about that sometime). Accuracy and timelines are important to me.
So, since I’m pretty good with excel, I have spreadsheets. Lots of spreadsheets. Lots of bookmarks for internet sites. Lots of lists. I have airline seating charts. I have birth dates for almost every character. I know how old every one was during a specific event, thanks to my spreadsheets. I mean, I’m going to be with the characters for a while, so I need to make them as real as possible. Except for the fact that they are too nice (another blog).
But, then there are the things I just plain made up. Again, fiction. Encounters between real people and my fictional characters that are integral to the stories. But I have their birthdays too, so it all works, hopefully. Since I don’t know these real people personally, I’m taking liberties with the personalities I project on them. This may be dangerous, but if you portray people as good and loving, you’re probably not going to go wrong. If you’re a writer, you already know all this. Research is key, even in fiction. These are my debut novels, and I haven’t done much creative writing since college, but even then, continuity was important to me. Hours in libraries taking notes from real books. There was no internet.
In any case, I hope you don’t find any glaring issues in the stories. I tried to make things as tight as possible. I hope you enjoy the stories, and these characters I wish I knew.