Four Things a Grammar App Will Never Catch about the Characters in Your Novel
A Book Style Guide beats any grammar app for helping you avoid inconsistencies in your characters
I get it. Characters change over the course of a novel. On an emotional level, the characters you start with may be completely different by the end of the story. As a copy editor, I’ve run into manuscripts where characters have changed nicknames, eye color, or other physical characteristics throughout the course of the story. That is a huge potential problem.
Writing a novel takes a long time. Even consecutive chapters may be written several months apart. When you’re writing an important scene in chapter 31, you don’t want to have to go back through the first several chapters to look up whether or not the childhood neighbor (who has suddenly resurfaced) had a mustache.
If you are submitting a manuscript for an editor’s consideration, you don’t want that person to be the one to spot discrepancies. You want to make sure these inconsistencies are nipped in the bud — before you finish the manuscript.
While grammar apps may provide some level of comfort in your spelling and punctuation, the following are some things they will never be able to catch about the characters in your novel manuscript.
- Inconsistencies in physical descriptions — If your character’s eyes are blue, make sure you don’t refer to them as green or brown later in the manuscript. Keeping track of the physical descriptions of all of your novel’s characters also helps you avoid discovering later on that, curiously, all of your male characters have mustaches as their one distinguishing feature. (Yes, I have edited books in which both of the above issues actually happened.)
- A character’s actions are inconsistent with their backstory — Having a clearly-developed backstory for each character will help you understand how that character may react to any situation that arises later in the manuscript — even if certain details from the backstory never make it into the book.
- Navigating the tangle of relationships — Consider creating a mind map to track the relationships between your protagonist, antagonist, and others. If you’ve got as many characters as a Dostoevsky novel, a mind map could help you keep these relationships straight.
- What’s in a (nick)name? — Another issue I’ve encountered is that a character’s nickname can change from chapter to chapter. I saw this happen in a story that followed a group of seven girls who had gone to school together. At one point, I noticed that their nicknames kept changing, and I found it difficult to keep track of who belonged with which nickname and who, exactly, was being referred to in a passage.
How a Book Style Guide Can Help You
The best way to keep track of the above details is to create a Book Style Guide as you are writing your novel. A Book Style Guide can be set up to track physical characteristics and the backstory of all your characters, as well as the correct spelling of all names and associated nicknames. It can be extremely valuable for science fiction writers who are making up complex names of not only characters, but of cities and worlds.
Your Book Style Guide can include a page or spread with the mind map showing the relationships of your characters, and it can include a hand-drawn map to help you remember that you said the Republic of Blandville was located to the northwest of the village you called Xykiardlung (wait… or was that Xykairldung?).
Having a guide you can refer to will not only make the writing process smoother for you, it could also help when you are submitting your manuscript to publishers. If an editor has to decide between two worthy manuscripts, you don’t want to risk being the one that requires “too much editing to make it publishable.”
