Continuity

After indulging in a few wasted hours of video hopping on Youtube I found myself in a loop of watching Movie Mistakes and errors and it got me to thinking about continuity.  One of the biggest problems writers face when writing complex story-lines is the issue of continuity - namely knowing the past of your character and events they have experienced and avoiding contradiction of established facts.

It must be hard to write for a Movie but it must be an outright headache to write for a Television series.  Take Coronation Street for example, it is the longest running British Soap Opera and has been running for 51 years with over 7,800 episodes.  Present cast included, Coronation Street has had 1,062 characters as of May 2012.  Writing for a show with that record of characters must be an absolute continuity nightmare.  To know all the characters and to avoid contradicting any established facts must be a mammoth task.

I wouldn't even know where to begin with any practical solution to that type of problem.  The only solution I could come up with would be entirely impractical - to have established character biographies for each character and a history of key events, but to read through so much or to be able to remember it all I think would be an extremely hard task, I don't even think the most ardent fan of the show could have an extensive knowledge of the entire cast past and present.  Then again the other argument would be that only the most recent history of the show would be relevant and perhaps the majority of that character list could be safely ignored.

The other approach is that of The Simpsons which has purposely highlighted before that continuity is not a goal of the show and indeed given Bart has been 10 for decades I think that's quite obvious.  Even so to hold a somewhat coherent structure there must be some approach to documenting or recording characters and their lives to make it easier to write characters with depth, as yet I haven't come across it myself, my mini-bio method seems to work for the most part but then again I haven't really wrote long stories, only short ones.