Happy Monday, Reader,

Last week, I talked about inconsistency from the reader’s side. How it pulls you out of a story, how it slowly begins to affect trust, and how something that feels small can end up changing the entire experience underneath.

And if you’ve been reading for a long time, you’ve probably felt that shift before.

I know I have. After a few thousand books (yes, I stopped counting at some point because it started sounding a little ridiculous), you start to notice patterns. The things that work, and the ones that quietly don’t. It’s not always the big, obvious mistakes that break a story. Sometimes it’s something smaller, something you can’t quite name in the moment, but you feel it anyway. A reaction that feels slightly off. A relationship that moves faster than it should. A detail that doesn’t quite line up with what came before. And suddenly, you’re not fully inside the story anymore. You’re just outside of it, watching.

For a long time, I thought that was just a reader thing. Something that happened on the receiving end of the story.

Then I started writing.

And, well… let’s just say I understood it a lot better after that.

Because here’s the thing no one really tells you when you’re in the middle of building a story: you’re not just writing what’s on the page. You’re carrying everything else along with it. Backstory, future scenes, character motivations, emotional context, random details you swear you’ll remember later (you won’t, but we all tell ourselves that). It all lives in your head at the same time, and for a while, it feels manageable.

Until it doesn’t.

Because at some point, you stop relying on what’s actually written and start relying on what you know. A character’s reaction makes sense to you because you understand everything that led them there, even if the reader hasn’t seen all of it yet. A relationship feels earned because you already know where it’s going. A detail feels unimportant because your brain has already moved three chapters ahead.

And that’s where things start to slip.

I saw this really clearly last year while working with a writer as an early reader. She had gone through her manuscript more times than she could count. She knew that story inside and out. Every choice made sense to her, every emotional beat had context, everything connected. But reading it for the first time, I could see the gaps.

She was a strong writer; that wasn’t the issue. It was because she had spent so much time with the story that she was no longer seeing what was actually on the page. She was seeing what she knew was there.

She said something to me afterward that stuck: she had read and edited her manuscript so many times that she couldn’t see the mistakes anymore, at least not the way someone with fresh eyes could.

And that’s the moment this clicks into place.

Rereading feels like the solution at first. Then it starts reinforcing the problem

When you reread your work, you’re not experiencing it the way your reader will. You’re reading it with memory layered over every scene. You fill in missing steps without realizing it. You smooth over transitions because you already understand where they lead. You connect emotional beats because you’ve been living with these characters far longer than anyone else will.

I run into this from a different angle in my own writing.

I’m what some people call a pantser, which sounds great until you realize it basically means “I trust the story will figure itself out as I go” (which it does… eventually… usually… okay, most of the time). Outlines and strict scene-by-scene plans give me hives, so I rely a lot on staying connected to the story as it unfolds.

One of the ways I do that is by rereading what I wrote in my previous session. It helps me drop back into the tone, the pacing, the emotional state of where I left off. It keeps the thread intact so I don’t feel like I’m starting from scratch every time I sit down to write.

But—and this is a big but—that approach has its own trap.

Because rereading can very easily turn into revising.

You see a sentence that feels slightly off, so you fix it. A line of dialogue could sound better, so you tweak it. A moment needs a little more weight, so you add to it. And before you realize what’s happening, you’re not moving forward anymore. You’re circling the same scene, trying to perfect something that doesn’t even have the full context of the story yet.

So now you’ve got two things happening at once. You’re holding most of the story in your head, and you’re constantly reshaping the parts that already exist, without always checking how those changes affect everything else.

And that, dear writer, is where inconsistency really starts to creep in.

For a while, I kept coming back to the same idea: I just needed to reread better. Pay more attention. Be more careful.

But that wasn’t really the issue.

The issue was that I was trying to keep too much in my head while I was doing it. And once that clicked, the approach changed. It became less about catching everything in the moment, and more about making sure I wasn’t relying on memory to hold the whole story together.

Recently, I started reading Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte (I’m only a couple of chapters in, so this is very much a “learning as I go” situation), and he talks about something called a commonplace book. It’s basically a system people used for centuries to collect ideas, notes, observations, things they wanted to remember and work with later.

What stood out to me wasn’t the idea itself, but why it existed.

People weren’t only writing things down to remember everything, they were building a place to store what mattered so they could come back to it, rearrange it, make sense of it over time.

And I just sat there thinking… this is the exact problem we run into as writers.

We try to hold everything in our heads and then wonder why things start slipping.

Once I started approaching my writing with that in mind, things got a lot clearer. Not perfect, because let’s be honest, nothing about writing is ever perfect, but clearer. I didn’t have to rely on memory as much. I could track what I had already established. I could check whether something actually lined up instead of assuming it did.

Sometimes that looks like a quick reverse outline at the end of a chapter. Sometimes it’s a running document with character details, timelines, or small things I know I’ll forget later if I don’t write them down. It doesn’t have to be complicated, it just has to exist somewhere outside of your head.

That’s also the idea behind the Story Tracker I created, but honestly, the tool matters less than the habit. You can use anything that works for you. The point is to give your story somewhere to live that isn’t just your memory.

Consistency comes from building something that supports you, especially in the moments when memory isn’t enough.

And if you’ve ever found yourself rereading your own work and thinking, “something feels off, but I can’t figure out what it is,” there’s a good chance you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re just trying to hold too much at once. And that’s a very human place to be in as a writer.

We spend so much time inside our stories, carrying pieces of them around without even realizing it, trusting that we’ll be able to keep everything straight as we go. Sometimes we can. For a while, it even feels like we have a handle on it.

Until something small slips. A detail here. A reaction there. Nothing dramatic, nothing that calls attention to itself, just enough to make the story feel a little less steady than it did before. And most of the time, we don’t notice it right away. We’re close to it, and that makes it harder to see clearly.

So instead of trying to carry all of that on your own, it helps to give yourself a little support along the way.

Here are a few ways you can do that:

• Bring in an alpha reader early, while you’re still writing the first draft. Someone who can catch the moment where the story starts to drift, before it turns into something harder to untangle later.
• Keep a story bible (or something like it). A place where your character details, timelines, and important decisions live outside of your head. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It just has to exist somewhere you can trust when your memory starts getting fuzzy.
• Try a reverse outline. At the end of a scene or chapter, write down what actually happened. Not what you planned, but what’s on the page. It’s one of the easiest ways to spot gaps before they start stacking.
• Work with other writers at your level. A critique group or even one or two people you can swap pages with can give you a perspective you won’t have on your own. Fresh eyes matter more than we like to admit.
• Be careful with friends and family as critique partners. They mean well, and they’re great for encouragement, but they’re usually focused on protecting your feelings more than challenging your work (my mom still thinks everything I write is amazing, which I love for me, but it doesn’t exactly help me fix a scene).
• Use a system that works for you. Whether that’s something you build yourself or a tool like my Story Tracker, the goal is the same: give your story somewhere to live outside of your head.

There isn’t one right way to do this. The common thread in all of it is simple: you’re not relying on memory alone anymore. You’re giving your story something to lean on when things start to feel a little unsteady.

Because they will.

And when they do, having that support makes all the difference.

See you next week,