101 TIWIK #71: Copy Edit Concluded: Consistency

Before we get to today’s post on how to check for and correct consistency in your manuscript, I have a fun little story to tell about how good things can come out of weird mistakes.

A couple of posts back, when I was introducing the copy edit section on grammar, I mentioned a couple of websites related to grammar. I was a bit rushed that day, so I didn’t follow my own advice and thoroughly copy edit my post, part of which would have been checking the spelling of the proper names of those sites and including links as a courtesy to the readers.

Much to my surprise, I found a very polite email this morning from someone at Grammarly, one of the sites I had mentioned. He informed me that I had misspelled the name of the site (I had typed Grammerly, which still looks right to me but is absolute proof that you cannot copy-edit by instinct). He kindly asked if I would correct the error and perhaps include a link to their site if I was so inclined.

In the process of doing so, still reeling with mortification at my spelling error in a post about spelling, I visited Grammarly.com and realized that it was something entirely different than what I was thinking of. I had never really looked into it, just seen it come up when typing grammar questions into Google. I assumed it was another grammar guide site like Grammarist or a Grammar Girl post.

What it actually is, is an amazing tool that will revolutionize internet grammar forever for everyone, and which I clearly need.

Here’s how it works: You install the Grammarly extension in your browser and add an account with them for free (they have a paid version as well). Then, when you’re typing on the internet, in a post, or an email, or, say, a blog, Grammarly checks your spelling and grammar. Click on an underlined word, and it pops up a box that tells you what grammar rule you might be violating, and gives suggestions to fix it. You can choose to accept a suggestion, or ignore it.

But the best part is it tells what you are doing wrong, explains the reasoning behind the rule you are breaking with examples. Basically, they give you a mini grammar lesson if you want it. (If you don’t, just don’t expand the box that comes up).

So, even though I’m horribly embarrassed to have misspelled a proper noun in a post about spelling, and not have caught it in my copy edit, the adventure led to something revolutionary. Talk about learning from your mistakes!

Now, onto consistency. Folks at Grammarly, if you find something inconsistent in this post I’ll write an entire post about how much I am loving using your genius invention ; )

Consistency

When you are writing fiction, you are creating a living world for the reader to dwell in. To that end, it is crucial that every detail in your final work be consistent. A break in consistency is like a voice in the reader’s ear whispering, “this is not real.” And you don’t want that. You want the reader to be utterly transported into the living world you’ve crafted.

There are inconsistencies that are obvious, like one character’s hair color being different in two different scenes, but there are other, more devious inconsistencies that run deeper and are trickier to find. Here are a few places where consistency can break down easily, whether in a real-world setting or world-built one.

Terms

While spellcheck (or Grammarly, if you’re sophisticated like me) can help you find misspellings of official words, it won’t help with your invented words, be they character names, places, concepts, animals, etc. If you have a made-up word in your book, be sure to check each and every instance for spelling, proper capitalization, and usage. Keep a glossary of terms that has your standard, to which you can compare inconsistencies. 

Timelines

No matter what you are writing, from a book that spans a single day to a generations-long saga, it can be way too easy to get your timing wrong. This is especially true if you are writing several storylines from multiple POV characters. By this point in the writing process, hopefully you’ve smoothed out all of those wrinkles in time, but there’s no harm in checking twice.

The first step to keeping your timelines straight is to track them carefully with some kind of system. A calendar can work well, especially if you are writing in the modern era and our current wall calendars match the dates in your work. If your timekeeping is more complicated, a spreadsheet is your best friend. With a spreadsheet, it is easier to add rows for multiple characters, so you can compare what various character is doing at a specific time/day.

Not only does the time layout in the book need to be consistent with your timeline, you also need to make sure the passage of time is clear to the readers. You can do this in a variety of ways, either by stating passage of time directly (“three months had passed . . .”) or using clues like changes in the moon phase, seasonal changes, physical development of a character, etc.

Now, not everything you have on your timeline is going to be in the book, but you still need to check every mention of timing in the book against the timeline. Pay special attention to places where inconsistency will cause large problems, like when two plotlines converge, or when a time pressure is used to create tension.

Scale

Scale can refer to physical space or the breadth and depth of a project. In this instance, I mean the physical scale of locations in your book. There are millions of tiny ways in which these can go wrong, and they are often related to time. For example, say you have a city in your book that is six miles across, and yet in a scene, you have a character walking from one side of the city to another in just ten minutes. Scale can affect timing, description, plot, and character. A character who grew up in a big city will be different from a character who grew up in a small town. A channel is a much different crossing, requiring different vessels and supplies, than an ocean. As with timing, you should keep careful notes on scales used in your book, and carefully check any references to scale in the book against your notes.

Population

Population is similar to scale in nature, but it deals with the amounts of people in specific places and categories in your book. Population is another seemingly minor detail that can have a dramatic effect on reader perception. Again, you want to keep detailed notes on the populations in your book. I keep a spreadsheet with a column for each kind of population, and a row showing what the population is at a given time in the book or in a specific location. (I tend to kill off people by the thousands, so this keeps the body count straight. Being able to subtract in the spreadsheet saves me the time of manually calculating the survivors of whatever particular horror I’m perpetrating).

Populations can refer to people in a specific location, or it can be people in a specific class, such as all magic users, or the numbers in opposing armies, or even a number of people holding a specific belief, if that’s important to the story. Inconsistencies arising from population confusion can include timing (it takes longer to move more people), scale (what does a thousand people actually look like? What space is needed to fit them? What about ten thousand? How big does a battlefield have to be to hold a million people?) and details like, how do you feed ten thousand people? What issues arise when you increase a population from a hundred to a thousand? How does information and belief spread through different scales of population?

Places

We’ve talked a bit about places already in terms of scale and population, but it is also important to keep every tiny detail about any setting in your book consistent. Again, keep clear notes on each location in your book, and update these notes if the place changes. An example of something that might create a location inconsistency; say your setting is arid, but your hero shows up out of the mist, dewdrops clinging to his hair.

Here are some place-related details to consider: location in relation to other places, climate, topography, population, scale, development vs wild spaces, the history of the place, the importance of the place in terms of the story (is it like a character in the story with its own personality, or is it just a place that the character are passing through?)

People

As with place, there are a million character details to keep track of and keep consistent. Names, physical descriptions, general demeanor and disposition, gestures, history, pets, roles in society, all of these things must be kept in your notes and remain consistent. Not only do you need to keep the physical details straight, the character’s behavior must be consistent with what the reader knows about the character. If your character typically wears sweatpants at home, don’t put him in a tux to do the dishes (as fun as that might be). If your character is an accountant, don’t have her tearing her hair out doing taxes. 

In Conclusion

If all of this seems like too much for a copy edit, remember that you should have most of this information straightened out by this stage. The categories listed above are things to look at in your final check, and hopefully you won’t find very many major inconsistencies. If you do, I recommend applying a fix that changes the manuscript as little as possible. Remember, simple is almost always better, especially at this stage in the game.

For example, say you have a timeline discrepancy that puts two major characters in different places when you have written them both to be present in one place at the climax. Rather than trying to rewrite the climax, go back through your timeline and see if there is something more minor, earlier on, that will fix the discrepancy. Maybe you can make one character wait in line for an hour at the DMV, pushing that character’s timeline forward just enough to match up with the other one.

But be careful not to introduce more inconsistencies as you resolve others! Remember that a story is like a web, and if you push in one place, it will move in another place. When you make any changes, no matter how small, follow them through the manuscript to make sure your change didn’t create new inconsistencies.

This concludes the miniseries on copy editing! In the next post, I’ll examine the one question that might be the very hardest for modern authors to answer: 101 TIWIK #72: How Will I Know When My Book is Finished?