Member-only story
Continuity is an alluring yet evil wizard. It tricks you into believing you’re building a cool land full of interconnected content, but you're really just bricking yourself into your own isolated dark tower. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing fiction, non-fiction, video games, movies, or any other thing that uses lines of text. Just because you personally know that you wrote a bunch of things in the past, that doesn’t mean that any of your readers/watchers/users are aware of that stuff, and if you fail to account for that, even in some small way, then you’ve messed up.
I’ve been writing and publishing words in public spaces for the last two decades. As I’ve built up a huge library of online content, the intense familiarity and the intimacy I have with my own creative journey and all those words I’ve put out there have become hindrances rather than helpful. It’s super easy for me to imagine my writing as an elaborate web or a line going all the way back to the beginning, or a complex tapestry of different thoughts…but that’s not remotely what it looks like to a brand new reader. Or even someone more dedicated who stops by every once in a while.
