A little peek behind the writing curtain with this photo. Just recently I was working on writing in book two of the Sacred Tears series and I came across a point in which I had a character who was supposed to reflect over the events that led them into their current predicament. The thing is, I started working on this book back in 2016. My journey into the world of Sacred Tears altogether began way back in 2006/2007. That is a long time to be working on a story.
I mean granted, there were a couple of years in between that due to general life stuff and bouts with depression that caused me to set my writings aside for a couple of years at a time. So it wasn’t like I was writing in the same story throughout that entire time. Still, the funny part in all of this is how unintentionally I began to associate my real life passage of time with the story’s passage of time.
That was until I got down to this scene in book two. I had to stop and re-read through sections of the first book and calculate the hours different events took for me to finally break down the events by day. At that point I recognized in story world timeline had only had a couple of weeks pass for the course of all events leading up to that moment.
Now some of you may be wondering how could I not know when I am the one writing my own story. Alongside the gaps in writing I’ve had before there is also the factor that my writing style falls within what the writing community calls being a “panster.” This is a person who ultimately writes “by the seat of their pants,” or in another sense is an exploratory writer. When we begin stories we rarely have any clue where they’re going or how they’re going to reach any goals we discover along the way.
While this method is great for allowing me to give a story room to breathe and become something entirely its own, there is a place of constantly having to be careful to not fall into plot holes or continuity errors. Then there’s the whole Dyslexia part of myself which keeps things even more interesting in a tendency for being more disorganized. How do I combat this? Why keep a desk full of different notebooks and scrap papers where you jotted down different story ideas all along the way.
Even if you’re more of the plotting a story all the way through ahead of time type, I would still strongly encourage maintaining a strong note system that allows you to double check yourself along the way. For some writers this is a given but not always. There are a ton of online programs even nowadays specifically made to help keep the details of our plots and our worlds all in order. Though me being the odd tactile person I am, I find that I have to do all my formulating, writing, planning, and notetaking by hand with pen and paper. There’s just something about the motor skills involved that helps my brain to streamline into the creation process and not be swept away by the world around me.
There’s no real “deeper lesson” I’m trying to achieve with this post today. Just more so a sharing of one of the technical sides I work through while writing. All I do know is that the struggle of continuity in a story is very real and sooo important.
Now please excuse me as I have to go switch gears on another crucial facet of writing, the study of human psychology…