Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

continuity - this right here is the line above which to many stories fail to clear. For ME i can live with the spelling and still score a story above a 7 if it can just keep its own storyline straight. Are the lucky ones the stories i stop reading and never return cause i don't score a story i don't finish or is it the ones i do grind thru to the end and score 7 or lower cause they repeatedly fail to keep the story consistent from chapter to chapter or hell paragraph to paragraph.
Sorry just a personal rant after yet again finding a story that ticks all the boxes i enjoy but is so internaly inconsistent i just cant finish it.
I blame Al Steiner (Aftermath) his was the very first story i ever read here so many many many years ago and i have held everything since to that standard, fair or not. So many of you have met that standard and i give thanks that you shared with us your story telling.

its an issue with everything.

there was a crime tv show. criminal minds maybe, one season ended with a cast member being killed, absolutely killed, yet the season opener for next season had the dead cast member back to work...

There was a CSI new york season, one charecter was paralyzed waiste down. Spent half the season in a wheelchair, then one day is wheel chair less and had never been paralyzed or wheelchair member.. never discussed again.

There is a very popular long running series here that has many interconnected individual stories that all come into one "universe." I dont want to name names.

There is always an age gap in the male/female relationships. often over the course of one of the individual stories the FMC will age explicitly by two years. Somehow in that same store the MMC will age by 4-6+ years. Its not isolated to just one story.

I feel like if an author is spending the time and effort to build a large interconnected universe with a vast cast...perhaps keep a list of facts and dates about your main characters to avoid very obvious continuity issues.