Continuity
Continuity
The consistency of a story's people, plot, objects and places over time, so that every established detail stays true across the work.
In fiction, continuity is "the consistency of the characteristics of people, plot, objects, and places seen by the audience over some period of time." Its failures are the errors readers cite: a wound that heals between scenes, a character referencing events they could not know about, an object that changes state between paragraphs. The problem is as old as storytelling; Horace called Homer's own slips "Homeric nods."
Screen production built the defenses, from the script supervisor who tracks every detail across an out-of-order shoot to daily photographs of costumes, sets and props, and the records feed the story bible. Prose sorts the failures the same way this glossary does: an accidental contradiction is a continuity error, catalogued in the seven continuity errors; a deliberate change is a retcon; and the set of facts being kept consistent is canon. For serial writers the stakes are structural, because published chapters cannot be quietly revised afterward.