Continuity Errors in Novels, and How to Catch Them by Hand

The Kinds, With Invented Examples

The word comes from film, where someone is paid to make sure the glass stays half full between takes. A novel has no such person until the copy edit, if it gets one. Most errors fall into eight families.

Kind	Example	How it gets in
Time	A baby conceived at a New Year party is born the week the clocks go back. A ten-month pregnancy, and nobody in the village mentions it	You moved the party in revision
Age	Bea is “barely thirty” in 2004, and remembers her father carrying her on his shoulders through the 1976 heatwave, when she’d have been two	Backstory written without arithmetic
Bodies	Dora breaks her left wrist on page 112. On page 140, she rows out to the island	Injuries heal at the speed the plot needs
Objects	Constable Frith’s car is at the garage all week. He drives it to the inquest	You needed him there by eleven
Places	The bedroom overlooks the river in chapter 4 and the yard in chapter 19. Or the walk to the station takes five minutes, then forty	Geography kept in your head
Knowledge	Dora accuses Frith of taking the letter. Nobody has told her there was a letter, because you cut that scene	The most damaging kind. You, the author, knew
Names	Mrs Ogilvie becomes Mrs Ogilby. Dora’s brother calls her Dot for 200 pages, then Dodie	You changed a name by memory, or found a better one
Rules	Only the eldest can open the ward, until the youngest needs to escape	The world bends to the plot

There’s a ninth, the real world, where your book contradicts a calendar. A bank manager takes a call at his desk on 14 June 1987, which was a Sunday. A full moon lights Monday’s escape and there’s no moon at all on Wednesday, though the phases take about 29.5 days to come round, so full and new sit about two weeks apart. A pub in Leeds prices its bitter in new pence in 1969, two years before Decimal Day. Someone will write to you about this one.

Which Ones Matter

Not all errors cost the same, and you have a finite number of mornings. Fix them in this order.

Anything that changes what a character could know or do. Knowledge errors and broken rules damage the reader’s trust in the story, because they suggest that you’re not paying attention or that the character is psychic.

Time and age. Readers do these sums more often than you’d hope, especially in a family story.

Injuries, pregnancies, deaths. They’re memorable, so a mismatch stands out. If a dead man turns up at breakfast, it had better be a ghost story.

Everything else. Whether the mug was blue is low on the list. Fix it when you see it, and don’t lose sleep.

How to Catch Them by Hand

None of these needs anything more than a pencil. Each takes a couple of hours and pays for itself.

Build a Calendar That the Book Has to Live In

Get a calendar for the year your story happens, or draw one for your invented one. Go through the manuscript and put every scene on a date, reading each mention of time as you go: “two days later”, “by the weekend”, “last spring”. You’ll find Thursdays with four scenes in them, and characters who are in two towns at once. Work out the moon, the school holidays and what day of the week each date falls on while you’re at it.

Do the Arithmetic on Everybody

Make a table with a row for each person and a column for each important year, then fill in their ages.

	Born	1976	1989	2004
Bea	1974	2	15	30
Her father	1941	35	48	63
Dora	1958	18	31	46

That’s five minutes’ work, and it would have stopped Bea remembering 1976 so clearly. Tables like this also expose odder things, such as a father who was thirteen when his daughter was born.

Keep a Knowledge Grid

Each row is a secret, each column a character, and each cell the chapter in which that person learns it. A dash means they never do.

	Dora	Frith	Mrs Ogilvie	Reader
The letter exists	ch. 6	ch. 2	ch. 2	ch. 2
Frith took it	ch. 21	ch. 2	–	ch. 14
The will is forged	ch. 30	–	ch. 9	ch. 25

Now check each one against the page. If Dora refers to the letter in chapter 5, you’ve found it. It’s worth keeping a reader column as well: it tells you whether a scene is a surprise or dramatic irony, and whether you’ve been repeating what the reader already knows.

Read One Thread at a Time

Read only Dora’s scenes, in order, and follow her left wrist. Then read only the scenes with the car. Reading sideways breaks the spell of the story, which is what stops you noticing things. This fits naturally into the revision pass on characters.

Search for Every Name

Search for each character’s name, and for the near misses: Ogilvie, Ogilby, Ogilvy. Then search for the things that move: car, keys, ring, letter. Read each hit in isolation, with no story around it to carry you. A style sheet, the page where a copy editor lists every spelling and every small decision, is the natural place to record what you find. A story bible is that with more in it.

Give a Friend the Job

Among the people you know, there’s someone who enjoys being right. Give them the manuscript, and ask them only to find what doesn’t add up. They’ll have a marvellous time.

When You Fix One, Look for Its Neighbours

A continuity error has relatives. When you change Dora’s injury from the left wrist to the right, you’ve also changed which hand she pours the tea with, signs the statement with and can’t open the door with. Before moving on, search for every mention, and record the fix in the same place you’d look it up next time.

Do this checking late. Structural revision moves scenes around, and each move can make a reveal come before its setup, so work done early will have to be done again. Then do it once more on the last version before it goes to a reader who matters.

If You’d Rather Not Do the Sums

The hand methods work, and you’ll know your book better for them. Software can do part of it. Shiro’s continuity checks use plain code, with no AI, to flag a person in two places at once, someone acting after their death, ages that don’t add up, time running backwards, impossible travel and things revealed out of order. It only knows what you’ve told it about your world, so the wrist is still your problem.

The Questions People Ask

What is a continuity error in a book?

A contradiction between two parts of the same story: a date, a detail, a location or a piece of knowledge that doesn’t match what was established elsewhere. The term comes from film, where a glass refills itself between shots.

What’s the difference between a continuity error and a plot hole?

A continuity error contradicts a fact and is usually fixed by changing a line. A plot hole is a gap in the logic of events, such as why nobody called the police. A knowledge error can be either, depending on how much hangs on it.

Do editors catch continuity errors?

Copy editors at trade publishers look for them and keep a style sheet as they go, but they can miss things, and many writers self-publish without one. It’s far easier to catch them yourself with a timeline than to rely on someone reading at speed.

Do readers really notice?

Not always. They forgive a wrong mug. They’re much less forgiving of a character who acts on something she can’t know, because that breaks the story rather than the set.

Last revised November 2026.