Keep your characters consistent

The four buckets that keep a character straight

Everything true of a character belongs in one of four buckets, and each bucket has a different rule. Immutable facts are true for the whole book and should never move — a birthplace, a handedness, a fundamental fear. Changeable states are true right now and are supposed to move — an injury, a rank, who a character trusts this week. Open questions are things you have not decided yet and must not let a draft decide for you by accident. And deliberate exceptions are intentional inconsistencies — a lie, a disguise, an unreliable narrator — that must never be "corrected."

The drift you are trying to prevent is almost always a bucket error. A burned hand (a state) gets treated as permanent and is still burned three books later. A false name (an exception) gets "reconciled" into a continuity mistake. A birthplace (a fact) drifts because it was only ever mentioned once. Sort the details correctly and most inconsistency simply stops happening.

A worked example: a changing injury and a deceptive name

Take Mara. She was born in the salt marshes and is left-handed — immutable facts; if a draft ever makes her right-handed, that is a flag. In chapter three she burns her left hand — a state, with a current value that keeps evolving; by chapter nine it is healing, and a continuity check should know the difference between "burned" and "was burned." From chapters four to nine she travels under the false name Sera — a deliberate exception; a naive consistency pass would see "Mara" and "Sera" as a contradiction and try to fix it, which would wreck the disguise.

Notice what a good process does here. It does not silently rewrite anything. It flags that chapter eleven still describes the burn as fresh, cites the two passages, and asks you whether the hand should have healed by now. It leaves "Sera" alone because you told it that inconsistency is on purpose. Every decision stays yours; the tool’s job is to surface evidence, not to overrule the author.

A continuity check should cite the evidence and ask for a decision. The moment a tool silently "corrects" your prose, it can no longer tell a mistake apart from a choice — and your deliberate exceptions are the first casualties.

Keep the canon where the whole book can see it

A Canon Card in a notebook is better than nothing, but it only helps if it is checked. The reason character drift is so common in long AI-assisted books is that the canon lives in a chat that scrolls away, so nothing is actually comparing chapter eleven against the facts you set in chapter three. Canon has to be somewhere durable, and it has to be consulted as you write.

That is what a blueprint in BookWriter is for: the immutable facts, the states, and the exceptions live as approved rules the manuscript is checked against, not as a message you hope to find later. When the connected continuity review is verified live, it reads that canon and proposes evidence-backed, smallest-possible corrections for you to decide on — one chapter at a time, never a silent rewrite.