I know everyone has different views on both worldbuilding and characterization, and especially on the idea of consistency in both, but I wanted to share my feelings on both of them (which are kind of the same! people and places are sort of the same thing sometimes).
Consistency, to me, is about three things: rules, guidelines, and lies.
Rules are things that (whether they've been told explicitly or not) are immutable. They are the law of the land, and you don't break them. You don't actually need to tell the reader what they are, but you should know what they are. They can be simple or they can be extremely complex, but they are things that you stick with. Unless stated otherwise, readers will generally assume that the rules of the real world apply to your story.
For the world, that might be "water is H2O" or "mountains will not stand up and turn into giant creatures and walk away" or "vampires and werewolves can cross-breed but only if they have sex during a new moon" or whatever. For a character, that might be "this character will not kill under any circumstances, no matter what" or "this character won't every tell their parents about that one time they committed arson." It's easier to do never rules for characters than always rules, but you can do both.
Guidelines are things that generally happen but aren't a requirement. This is where people tend to get caught up in character/worldbuilding consistency. Most character traits are going to be guidelines, not rules, because most people do have exceptions or things that change their mind or just character growth. Most things in the world don't work exactly the same way 100% of the time. But there generally needs to be an implicit or explicit explanation for the guideline not being followed, or it just feels like the author screwed up.
For the world, these might be "water isn't flammable--except in those cases where it is" or "vampires and children can't have kids, except in those super rare cases where they can" or "that one time, a mountain stood up and walked five feet and sat back down, but other than that it's never happened so we're pretty sure it'll never happen again". For a character, that might be "this character's instinct is to run away from things that scare them, but this one time they will overcome that instinct to protect someone else" or "this character is generally happy-go-lucky but right now they are deeply sad because something tragic has happened".
Lies are where it gets fun. Lies are things that you have presented as rules that are actually not. Somtimes this is because a character is literally lying to the reader or to other characters, sometimes it's because characters don't have full information, and sometimes it's because some other factor has changed.
For the world, this might be "only people from the royal family can bond with dragons because they have been genetically modified to bond with dragons--oh, actually, that was a lie perpetrated by the government to keep people from trying to bond with dragons" or "there is no eighth continent on Earth--actually there is, it was just hidden from view by magic". For a charcter, this might be "this character would never under any circumstances kill someone--except they just did."
The thing about lies is that they need to have a good in-universe reason behind them, and they can't conflict with other rules you have. I always go back to Stephenie Meyer when I think about this. Early in the series, she set up two rules that she told the reader explicitly: 1) all of vampires' fluids are venom and 2) vampires have 25 chromosome pairs, werewolves have 24 chromosome pairs, and humans have 23 chromosome pairs. The lie that vampires can't have children with humans runs into the issue that it's in direct conflict with those two rules above--but those two rules are never rescinded. So it doesn't feel like a lie so much as it feels like an inconsistency. It feels like she messed something up.
When you're thinking about internal consistency, consider:
Is something a rule, a guideline, or a lie?
If a guideline isn't being followed, is it clear why (e.g., is it an exception? character growth?)
Why was the lie a lie?
Does the lie conflict with other rules in the world?
What does the lie or the exception to the guideline accomplish?
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I forgot to actually type up a new proper post and now its 2 30 in the morning so here's the writing advice:
If you want to have an Unreliable Narrator that is not an excuse to make stuff up as you go along with no plan because "my character doesn't know whats really going on, so its fine for me to not know either"
-- in fact just the opposite. If you want a well-written Unreliable Narrator, then you, the author, need to have a solid understanding and knowledge of events that are going on around your main character, and what ripples your character sees as a consequence of the actions taking place outside of their view/understanding.
You don't need to know every single thing while writing for Novella November because we're focusing literally just on first drafts,
but it Is important that once your first draft is done , You are going to go back and do major editing to give your world consistency and make it make sense:
That things are being built up to, foreshadowed; that when something Big is revealed later in the book, It isn't literally just coming out of nowhere, you need to establish it in the background radiation of your work so that astute Readers will be able to spot the signs of its approach even if your main narrator does not, and anyone who didn't notice the foreshadowing the first time they read the book will be delighted to find all of the little bits of foreshadowing the second (or more) time through reading the book.
The best ""plot twists"" are the ones that built up to and foreshadowed within the narrative, not just doing a random, out-of-left-field twist for the sake of a twist.
Its perfectly fine, going into your novel to not have a plan and make stuff up as you go along, but once that first draft is done and its time for your second draft, you also need to make sure you're adding those things back into earlier parts of your story to have proper continuity and internal consistency.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
For those of you out there who are writing fantasy, or science fiction, or horror, or anything really, at some point you might ask yourself ‘is my story realistic’. After all, some science fiction uses ‘hard science’ based on physics and scientific theory, while other stories have psychic god emperors, planet destroying laser beams, and technology so wildly advanced it’s almost akin to magic.
But don’t worry. Your story doesn’t have to BE ‘realistic’ to feel realistic. What matters most is internal consistency; a story whose world, atmosphere and characters remain constant throughout.
Characters need to remain true to their nature. Established rules in the world, like the laws of magic, can’t change. If you spend time and effort making the story feel realistic, like researching military tactics for your battles, then you can’t just stop because you’ve written your characters into a spot they would realistically lose. On the other hand, if you have a whimsical, fantastic world, where characters often act very illogically for the sake of humor (e.g. Discworld) then silliness must consistently happen.
The key is authenticity, and I think HBO’s Rome is a very good example of this. Rome, which was Game of Thrones before Game of Thrones existed, had an enormous budget developed to making its ancient Roman setting appear as realistic to the times as possible. The culture, the costumes, the battles... all of it was designed to emulate ancient Rome. The plot, on the other hand, took a number of liberties with history for the sake of entertainment. It’s hard to say Rome gave an accurate account of history, but what it did do was create a world that felt like its own thing. It felt real, even if the history often wasn’t.
A lot of horror movies are on the opposite end of the spectrum. It isn’t the existence of monsters or immortal hockey-masked serial killers that often garners mockery for the horror genre. It is instead the extreme stupidity of its protagonists. People running off into dark alleys, making out in the woods, ignoring obvious signs something is severely wrong... horror almost always takes place in our world, yet people don’t act like intelligent humans. There is a lack of authenticity that causes audiences to lose interest.
TLDR: Be consistent! If you have rules in your world, stick to them! And if you do this, it won’t matter if your premise is realistic or not. It will feel real to those reading it.
Last time, I discussed the importance of editing for continuity in the categories of time, place, and people. This week, we're going to focus on the plot-centered issues of internal consistency and plot holes. The line between these two categories is vague at best, but I'm still going to discuss them separately. For our purposes, let's say an internal inconsistency is a problem with the world building and a plot hole is a problem with the plot (as the name implies).
Internal Consistency
I'm not of the belief that you need to know every single thing about your fictional world—when the agricultural revolution happened, how ALL of the economic systems works, etc—but you do have to know enough for it to make sense, and you have to realize when it doesn't. Even if your setting isn't consistent with our world, it needs to be consistent with itself, thus the phrase "internally consistent". You can't break your own rules.
You should be thinking about internal consistency throughout the writing process, but, well, some people don't, so editing is your last shot. Ask yourself, does everything that you have chosen to include in a story follows naturally from how you've built your world? Is there something you don't talk about in your book, but that needs to be mentioned for the world to make sense? If you were a reader, is there anything that would strike you as "off" or unbelievable about the world, even in (or specifically because of) the setting it's in?
For example, in the the setting of Leigh Bardugo's fantasy books, known collectively as the Grishaverse, homosexual relationships are considered as normal as heterosexual ones. Yet, in Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, there's this whole subplot about how Wylan's father thinks he's unfit to inherit his mercantile company because Wylan can't read; the father has already divorced/disappeared Wylan's mother, attempted to have Wylan murdered, and remarried so he can get a "better" heir. But, um, why? In a setting where gay relationships are the same as straight ones, there would have to be systems in place for non-bloodline inheritance. Otherwise, homosexual relationships would be seen as a burden by families, since gay heirs wouldn't be able to have heirs of their own without all sorts of weirdness (which I hardly think the families or the heirs would be okay with!). Bardugo has two conflicting societal norms: homosexual relationships are considered normal, and bloodline inheritance is a necessity. She needs to deal with one of those two things, either by explaining it (maybe Wylan's dad cares about blood when no one else does) or getting rid of it (nix the entire subplot with the new wife and have Wylan's dad trying to set up some adopted son or trusted coworker to be his successor instead). Otherwise, part of her world just doesn't make sense.
Internal consistency requires that you think about how everything is connected and affects everything else. No man is an island, they say; no world building factoid is an island, either, I might add. If you want your world to be taken seriously, you have to take it seriously by stepping into it and seeing it as a place with history, culture, sociology, natural history, cosmology, and so on. This is true regardless of how close or far removed your setting is from our own. If you make even one change—vampires exist, no one lives past the age of thirty, the North lost the Civil War, etc—it will have ripple effects across society and the world. Take some time to think about wether or not you've thought those effects through, and wether they might impact something important in the rest of your setting.
If everyone in your society is put into a warrior caste, lawmaker caste, scientist caste, and un-person caste, who grows all the food? Maybe mention that at some point. If you have a space fairing civilization, why would weapons dealers be the richest people and not fuel manufacturers. Maybe switch that around (Last Jedi, I'm looking at you!). If there was a widespread conflict between magic users and non-magic users, can you justify the people who can't wield supernatural forces as being the winners? If wizards have always lived apart from muggles, as evidenced by their robes, feather quills, parchment, and candles, why do they also use locomotives and buses? Why not use pens, paper, and lightbulbs as well? These are the types of questions you should answer at some point, and the editing process is your last chance to do it.
Plot Holes
Plot holes are easier to spot, yet they find their way into published works more than any other inconsistency, probably because people—writers, editors, those who should know better—tend to get so caught up in the story that they overlook things that don't quite make sense. You owe it to yourself, your story, and your readers to keep constant vigilance concerning holes in the plot.
One common plot hole is when a character has some ability or item that could easily solve some problem, but... they just don't use it. Why? Because the plot requires it! Another example is when the villain insists on carrying out some complicated scheme instead of the much simpler option because... plot.
An example that combines both of these hole types is Voldemort's plan in Goblet of Fire, in which the entire plot of the book is predicated on not using a Portkey in a timely fashion. Hear me out. We are shown that Portkeys (items that teleport people who touch them) can be made from anything, even trash. We are eventually shown that the Triwizard Cup is a Portkey, as it is used to teleport Harry to the spot where Voldemort uses his blood for magical resurrection fuel. We learn that Barty Crouch Jr. has gotten close to Harry so that he can manufacture Harry's win, so that Harry can be the first to touch said Portkey. I repeat: he gets very close to Harry, pretending to be his teacher. Harry trusts him. And Portkeys can be anything. Anything.
Do you see my problem? Why not make some random classroom item the Portkey? "Potter, go fetch that book on my desk. The purple one." BAM! Harry's in a graveyard and Voldemort can do the ritual. No need to make sure Harry's name gets in the Goblet of Fire, or talks to Hagrid, who takes him to see Charlie's dragons, in the hopes that this information might give Harry a leg up in the contest, maybe, and then do all the other convoluted things that might, hopefully, ensure that Harry has a head start into the final challenge. I mean, I love Goblet of Fire, but its plot absolutely does not need to exist. The fact that Barty Crouch Jr. doesn't just smack Harry with a Portkey while passing him in a lonely hallway or something is a huge, gaping plot hole.
Another sort of hole is when writers change the rules for certain characters for the sake of the plot. Again, let's look at Harry Potter (if it seems like I'm picking on Rowling, it's because I was absolutely obsessed with her books as a teenager. I nitpick because I care!). In Deathly Hallows, Rowling established that to become the master of the Elder Wand, you have to "defeat" the previous owner. Malfoy defeated Dumbledore with Expelliarmus, then Harry defeated Draco by physically grabbing Draco's wand—not the Elder Wand, mind you, but Draco's own wand—so that Harry is now the Master of the Elder Wand. But we're to believe that Voldemort, then, doesn't become master of the Elder Wand when he Avada Kedavra's Harry in the forest? Why not? How does basically killing someone not count as "defeat" when disarming someone or stealing their stuff does? Because Harry's the Chosen One, I guess? And the plot required it.
Let me be clear, I'm not saying you have to fill in every plot hole, but you definitely have to address them all, in one way or another. Let's go back to our two examples.
Option one, of course, is to fix them. In Goblet of Fire, maybe the resurrection ritual has to take place during an eclipse, and wouldn't you know it, the final challenge of Triwizard Tournaments also takes place during eclipses, and maybe Barty Crouch Jr. has to actually be present at the resurrection ritual so he can't slap Harry with Portkey on that day... or something. For Deathly Hallows, maybe nix the Deathly Hallows (and thus the Elder Wand) subplot from the story entirely, since they add nothing to the plot (in a later post, I will argue that they actually derail the plot), which already involved finding and destroying Horcruxes.
Option two is to keep the plot hole, but explain why it isn't a plot hole. We already know Voldemort could have used any enemy's blood in the resurrection spell (no, really, he says this in the book!) but he has an obsession with Harry. Perhaps this obsession could lead him to forsake the obvious course of action I outlined and instead focus on producing a "worthy" enemy by having Harry "prove himself" in the tournament. As for Deathly Hallows... I mean, I guess you could say Voldemort didn't defeated Harry in the woods, but defeated a piece of his own soul, but that's still pretty weak, in my opinion (just stick with option one and get rid of the Hallows!). Anyway, for this option, the writer has to acknowledge that the plot-hole does exist, but that there is a reason for it to exist, and thus isn't really that much of a plot hole.
A final option is to hang a lantern on it. This means that you leave the plot hole in and point out how big of a hole it is. This works better for comedies or stories where characters are meta-aware of tropes than in more serious works (so, not Harry Potter). For example, have someone wonder why so-and-so didn't use that super useful item back there. Well, he's an idiot, so he forgot! Or maybe someone points out how incredibly unlikely it is that a certain character showed up at exactly the right time and place the other characters needed them in, and he says, "Well, that's a funny story, actually..." before being interrupted, and it is never brought up again. If you're writing such a story and come across a plot hole, feel free to have your characters point it out and move one, as long as you can do this in a way that feels natural to your writing style.
Of course, both world building and plot are so central to any narrative that fixing them may require more than a simple tweak and instead, a complete overhauling of large parts of the story. Next time, we will discuss how to tackle these and other issues during rewrites!
That is, in the prototypical Quantum Theory defined by a Hamiltonian, viz the Harmonic Oscillator, the famous Hamiltonian isn't a complete operator on that space. It can't be a bounded operator, as it's got arbitrarily large singular values. You could restrict to A Subspace where the Hamiltonian is complete, but that rather changes things. The subspace itself won't be complete w.r.t the original Hilbert Norm; but the Hilbert Norm is also the definition of Born-Rule Probabilities. So... Someone someday will/has clean[ed] up the terminology and the conceptual framework... and that won't really fix everything, but it might be very healthy for everyone.
