Continuity

One thing that is hard to do when reading a book after taking a long break is picking it up again and remembering what happened. Even if we know what page number we left off at, it’s hard to remember everything that happened up to where we stopped. The plot and characters will seem hazy, like parts of a jigsaw puzzle that’s put together, and even though we might remember what events occurred, it can be challenging to know in what order they happened in (or what happened in-between crucial events).

I find that if I don’t continue reading a book within a month or two, I might as well start over. So much has occurred in my everyday life that those everyday experiences start to replace what I remembered from the book (i.e. conversations I had, chores I did, things I researched and bought, etc.) Plus, the book doesn’t bring the same experience as when I first started to read it. I actually wind up spending more time and energy trying to catch up and remember what happened and who is who rather than continuing with the story.

The same is somewhat true with writing, but not entirely. With stories I’ve written, I’ll notice that the word choice and prose of my older stories will seem vaguely familiar, but it’s not how I would write them now. The ideas and concepts of the stories will give me a feeling of deja vu, but my enthusiasm for the stories will have faded since I first wrote them. It’s like another version of me wrote those stories, but the me now would write them differently or at least incorporate ideas I’m currently interested in.

Continuity works best when we read a story on daily or weekly basis, and when the ideas we have are fresh in our minds when we’re writing. After a long break, however, whether that’s weeks or months or years, it’s hard to connect with or remember where we left off at. It’s like our minds can only keep track of what’s relevant (the here and now) rather than what’s far off.

Of course we can “sort of” remember what we read or wrote, but those memories will be choppy and vague, and we can’t quite enter back into that state of mind from our past, since new memories and new knowledge change the way we see things and understand them, disrupting the continuity we last remembered like a film that is missing scenes or a book that’s missing pages.