Pet Peeves: Continuity and Logic Errors

Somewhere along the line, most writers are going to be trying to convince someone (or lots of someones) to buy their story. It may be an editor, it may be readers if you go the self-publishing route. There's lots of things you don't want to do to people you're trying to get to buy your story. Making them feel bored is obviously a big no-no. Repeated typographical or grammatical errors are another one.

Something that's subtler, but a real pet peeve of mine, are errors in continuity, facts, or logic.



"Continuity" is probably the least familiar term from that list. It refers to keeping everything consistent. If a character's wedding ring is gold in the first scene it doesn't become titanium half-way through the book. (Well, unless it's a different ring, of course...) Or, a character who has a lackadaisical manner to their speech and uses lots of slang doesn't start sounding live Jeeves the butler partway through the story. (Again, unless there's a reason for the change.) When continuity fails, it pulls the reader out of the story -- reminds them that they are reading -- and that makes the experience suffer.

The concept of a factual error is pretty straightforward. Saying that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1800 is going to throw your readers for a major loop unless you're writing an alternate history story. One that was particularly jarring for me, so much so that I wrote a whole blog post about it on my short-lived earlier blog, was a factual error in the novel Let the Right One In. It's set in Sweden in the early 1980s and near the beginning of the book, there's a reference to a character owning a lot of Goosebumps books. One problem... The Goosebumps series didn't start until about 10 years later! I was so baffled by that reference that I went looking on the internet to see if maybe the American series was a recreation of a European series of stories from earlier decades. As far as I could tell then (and now) that wasn't the case and it was simply a mistake either on the part of the author or (more likely, I suspect) the translator. I read this book over two years ago and I still remember this. Maybe (OK, probably) that says something about me. Still, getting facts wrong in your story can make readers feel unhappy. So, best not to do that!

Logic errors are those times when you're reading a story and two and two adds up to three or five. These are the hardest of this group to describe and aren't usually the sort of thing that just jumps up and smacks you in the face. One example would be the "idiot plot" story where the story happening as the writer tells it depends on one or more characters acting like a blithering idiot. Say there's a heist story where the thieves' plan depends on getting a security guard away from their post for ten minutes. A simple false alarm for a fire probably isn't going to be enough for that. If you show the guard going off to investigate the alarm and not coming back for an excessively long time, there'd better be a reason. (You could have, for example, have previously established that the guard hated being at their station and would use any excuse to stay away for a few extra minutes. That's not a great example, but you get the idea.)

Ultimately, all of this comes down to keeping your reader immersed in the story and not reminding them that they're reading words on a page (or screen) that someone else wrote. Sure, you want them remembering your name, but you don't really want them thinking about it when they should be thinking about your characters and all the awful situations you're putting them in!

Do you have pet peeves when you're reading fiction that yank you out of the story?