Why Character Continuity Breaks Immersion

Writers have waged an eternal battle with the beast that is continuity. As they iterate through versions and editing sessions the story inevitably changes. It is hard to keep track of the butterfly effects of these changes through out the story all in your own head. This leads to continuity errors, the lovely errors that readers love to point out in reviews and feedback emails.

There are several answers to this problem, there are a few websites that help you plan for your characters but that is more of a fringe benefit instead of the primary purpose of the site. The most common answer I have seen has been keeping a spreadsheet with all the character inventories and changes but spreadsheets are not designed for tracking changes between chapters without adding a tab for each character and having an incredibly long spreadsheet or having a work book for each character with a tab for each chapter. This quickly expands into 50 if not 100 workbooks that you have to manage as your story expands and your characters grow and change.

[Brace yourself for the shameless plug, if you don't want to read it please skip this paragraph.]

This is why I created writeclifford.com. Those how have some experience with software development will be familiar with git, a version control system that lets you track changes to your codebase. This makes it easier to roll back your codebase in the event of a software breaking bug. Clifford is like that but for writers, the primary use case I had envisioned was for litrpg, progression fantasy, and potentially epic fantasy. These seem to be the genres that have the most expansive inventory and skill lists that need to be tracked. Although all are welcome to use the tool no matter what you are writing.

In short there is no solution that does not add extra work without solving the problem. But there are solutions that can help us win this war, the best one for you depends on... You, the individual, it depends on how you best think and how your brain works. So find what works for you and stick to it.