{"id":2676,"date":"2012-12-03T19:07:13","date_gmt":"2012-12-04T02:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2676"},"modified":"2012-12-03T19:07:16","modified_gmt":"2012-12-04T02:07:16","slug":"continuity-pass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2676","title":{"rendered":"Continuity Pass"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I should never promise anything &#8220;tomorrow.&#8221; Most of the time, the universe conspires with itself to make a liar of me&#8230;as it did this time.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway. I have just completed the second pass through <em>Ten Gentle Opportunities<\/em>. It&#8217;s what I call a &#8220;continuity pass.&#8221; The goal is to ensure that the story makes reasonable sense, taking particular care to repair &#8220;plot holes.&#8221; It&#8217;s not really a polish pass. In a very real sense it&#8217;s a tech edit, like those I used to do on magazine articles and still do on book-related material from time to time. Here are some of the things I watch for, and fix when found:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>People, things, or ideas introduced early in the story but never mentioned again. We all know that stories grow in the telling&#8211;but they also <em>contract<\/em>, and in doing so early elements sometimes get squeezed out. This is especially important in stories (like this one) that took a long, long time to tell.<\/li>\n<li>Things introduced later in the story that are not &#8220;foreshadowed&#8221; and thus may strike the reader as a complete surprise, or (worse) <em>deus ex machina<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Jumps&#8221; in a character&#8217;s emotional state. Growth and change are important in characterization, and have to be done out where the reader can watch them happen. If a character changes too abruptly, or off where the change can&#8217;t be seen, it sounds hokey.<\/li>\n<li>General inconsistencies in the ways people and things are treated early on in the story vs. later in the story.<\/li>\n<li>Finally, to make sure that all the made-up words are spelled the same way throughout. (This isn&#8217;t trivial when the story contains proper names like <span style=\"FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'; FONT-SIZE: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA\">Ttrynngbrokklynnygyggug and <span style=\"FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'; FONT-SIZE: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA\">Jrikkjroggmugg.)<\/span> I originally coined a lot of proper names from Stypek&#8217;s universe that had no vowels in them at all, but in workshopping chapters I found that nobody thought this was amusing but me. (Maybe I was a little too impressed with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cartalk.com\/content\/vowels-bosnia\" target=\"_blank\">the famous 90&#8217;s gag about Clinton air-dropping vowels on Bosnia<\/a>.) I went back and added just enough vowels to suggest a pronunciation.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'; FONT-SIZE: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA\">There is still polishing to be done, and here and there some stiff rewriting. I simply don&#8217;t like Chapter 57, for example. I intend to rewrite it from scratch once I get a little emotional distance from the story. As it&#8217;s only 1200 words, the rewriting won&#8217;t take long. The rest of the polishing to be done involves watching for &#8220;echoes&#8221; (words used more than once a little too close in the manuscript) and probably eliminating some adverbs, though I think the current campaign against adverbs is a deranged fetish perpetrated mostly by bad writers and people who teach writing without writing much of anything themselves. Polishing is a separate pass and my next challenge. Much of the first half of the book has already been polished (I&#8217;m a compulsive polisher) so the pass won&#8217;t take long.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'; FONT-SIZE: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA\">I&#8217;ve sent the story to my beta testers, and now I&#8217;m waiting to get some reactions. In the meantime there&#8217;s a root canal in my future this Wednesday morning. It&#8217;s nothing I haven&#8217;t known about for some time, and I&#8217;ve been through enough of them to have a reasonable idea what I&#8217;m in for. One peculiarity of my biochemistry is that the nitrous oxide gas used as a calming agent by some oral surgeons simply doesn&#8217;t work for me. The surgeon doing the procedure has an office with an interesting gimmick: flat-panel TV sets in the ceiling, so that while he&#8217;s drilling out your molar you can lean back and watch <em>Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/em>. As for the inevitable anxiety in the runup to a root canal, I suspect that ativan steps in where nitrous fails. We&#8217;ll find out on Wednesday.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I should never promise anything &#8220;tomorrow.&#8221; Most of the time, the universe conspires with itself to make a liar of me&#8230;as it did this time. Anyway. I have just completed the second pass through Ten Gentle Opportunities. It&#8217;s what I call a &#8220;continuity pass.&#8221; The goal is to ensure that the story makes reasonable sense, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[18,20],"class_list":["post-2676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daybook","tag-sf","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2677,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2676\/revisions\/2677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}