Maintaining Internal Logic & Consistency
Maintaining the internal consistency and logic of our writing can easily slip a writer’s attention, but such issues can be a nuisance for readers. The facts you present must agree with all facts stated elsewhere, but the finer details can become difficult for us to pick out. If you’re worried about committing these kinds of errors in your writing, read on for my advice.
In this post:
What do we mean when we say internal consistency?
Why checking for internal consistency is important
Risk factors for errors
Making “mistakes” on purpose
How do you watch for these errors?
What do we mean when we say internal consistency?
When an editor points out issues with internal consistency or logic, they’re most often talking about some confusion occurring between Point A and Point B. Although a story’s plot is most likely to suffer these errors, the issues I’m referring to here are smaller than that.
Once plot consistency is reviewed by a structural editor, making sure the text reads smoothly in terms of logic and consistency is the job of a copy editor. An editor is about as zoomed in to your piece as they can be at this point, so think details like the colour of a sweater or when you describe a certain character’s route home from work.
Even if you’re writing a work of fiction, what we’re focused on here are the “truths” of your story. Sometimes this is something visual and easy to picture. Other times, it’s something more ephemeral that just doesn’t jibe with what you’ve previously written.
Why checking for internal consistency is important
Although these types of errors are rarely as glaring as plot holes, they can cause a moment of doubt in your reader, or even pull them out of the narrative. Think of it like a nice cotton shirt that’s been moth-eaten in a few minor places. If you go to put that sweater on, it won’t completely unravel, but the quality will have diminished.
You don’t want your reader to be wondering why you said Luis’s grandmother lived on Cherry Street in the last chapter and now she suddenly lives on Beaumont Drive on the other side of town. (Okay, so a reader isn’t likely to conjure up a full map of your setting in their head as they read, but you get the idea.)
Readers may or may not pick up on these issues, but the more frequently the issues occur, the more likely the reader’s enjoyment will suffer.
And, though it might go without saying, in non-fiction you’ll need to be especially careful that you capture the look or feel of your story, not only accurately, but also consistently throughout the work.
Risk factors for errors
As one can imagine, certain factors increase the risk of these issues popping up. Take these two, for instance:
The more descriptive elements you introduce in your work, the more likely you’ll write something that conflicts with an earlier detail.
The more complex a particular scene is, the more room there is to make mistakes in how characters move and interact with each other and the setting.
A good example for the latter case is an action scene. Whenever multiple actions are happening in sequence, pitfalls abound. If you’re writing about a barroom brawl, for instance, there are a lot of characters to keep track of, and then you have their actions on top of that.
In these instances, it may be helpful to block out the scene as you would in a play. Try drawing out a map and walking through the sequence on a piece of paper. That way you can avoid saying that a person was flipped over the bar in one moment, then they were seen walking out of the washroom and into the fray in the next.
Making “mistakes” on purpose
Of course, there are times when an author chooses to include what seems like an error on purpose. The goal of these “errors” isn’t just to keep your audience on their toes (taking an adversarial relationship with your readers is not usually considered wise). It’s a technique that can sew doubt in what your readers have assumed to be true.
The classic example of this is the unreliable narrator. A narrator is our viewpoint in the story, so there may be opportunities to play with the implicit trust your readers will develop with them.
In certain genres, like detective fiction or mystery, small contradictions are something the readers are not only expecting, but watching for astutely.
And in other situations these gaps or inconsistencies can be used to keep your audience off kilter. It’s said that Stanley Kubrick purposefully made the layout of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980) an impossibility in order to feed into the psychological horror of the film.
How do you watch for these errors?
But let’s assume for the moment that you’re concerned about introducing a logical gap in your work by mistake. After all, accidental errors could detract from those which you plan to include on purpose. So what can you do?
The first thing to keep in mind is that as much as you may be talented, you’re not perfect. And that’s okay! It’s uncommon for us to catch smaller mistakes in our own writing. When you’re the originator of the ideas, you’re more likely to skim over information as minute as this. You might even correct issues in your head automatically without realizing it.
There are of course tools you can arm yourself with when reviewing. Editors, for instance, use a lot of lists, and they are tools that you can adopt as well. Perhaps instead of a review checklist or a style sheet, you might find it more useful to keep your notes on hand to cross-reference important details like character or setting descriptions as you write.
At the end of the day though, it really does pay to have someone else look at your work. An editor or a beta reader is more than just someone reviewing your work—they’re a fresh set of eyes—and while they may not be as personally connected to the project, they’ll be invested in making sure your work is as smooth as it can be.
Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.
She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.
