it's simpler than that
My friends, I love that you care, because I care too. But I think there’s some misunderstanding of what I was trying to say in the last post. No, for the timeline-obsessed, you are never going to jam into the puzzle every reference everyone has ever made to how old they are, or how long they’ve been practicing medicine. Certainly not if you’re taking them literally; and possibly not even if you’re taking them as kidding or speaking colloquially.
Let me quote for a minute from a response I made to a comment:
“I'm not saying there may not be continuity issues, here or elsewhere; but it's also legitimate to note that when characters speak colloquially they talk the way people talk -- they round numbers up or down, and they joke. I've never forgotten that once on the X-Files Mulder told his ex-girlfriend, "I'm cursed with a photographic memory." I assumed at the time he was saying in his smartass way that he couldn't forget the hurt she'd caused him, and I was taken aback by the number of fans who interpreted it absolutely literally and felt it was later contradicted by canon. I'm not saying that it might not have turned out to be literal; I'm just saying that when people talk, they don't speak with the exactitude of Wikipedia. Similarly, when a woman says that she's 38, one may choose to believe it or not. When the guy fixing my sink argues with me about the cause and says, "Look, lady, I've been doing this for 20 years," I don't count backwards to exactly that month 20 years before and assume that's when he got his plumbing license.
Again, I'm not saying the House timeline is free of continuity tangles. I know for a fact it's not. (And since I'm often trying to patch new and old canon together, may I say, boy do I know.) But there seems to be a certain amount of slack that's understood in real life that is not always offered to fictional characters. We actually discuss this when debating our options with lines of dialogue -- and I mean, not only writers, but actors and directors. How if a certain line were changed to something more specific it might fit better, but it would sound weird. You do the very best you can and hope that that part of the audience that's paying close attention will understand.”
So, Doris, you’re claiming it will all make sense if we just aren’t literal?
No, I have specifically not said that. I would love if it did, but it’s unlikely to ever happen. (Though I have a personal timeline that I believe actually would make sense, if you’re not absolutely literal, of House saying he’s practiced for 20 years, his present age, knowing Cuddy when she was an undergrad, etc. But it’s dependent on some things you’re probably never going to see in the show, including what I like to believe happened during “House: The Lost Years,” so let’s not pretend it’s going to solve anything.)
The post is saying something else. It’s saying - well, simply that I care, that I try, that these characters are important to me and I make a concerted effort to fit whatever I’m doing into what’s gone before. I’m saying that Matt and I pulled every reference to House and Cuddy’s shared past, had our work double-checked, argued things out with a number of people, discussed the fan Wikipedia reference where the assumption about Hopkins had been made, and even came up with internal character reasons why Michigan was first and how he got into Hopkins. (Nothing you’re ever going to see, again, but you want it to hang together in your mind if you’ve got to write it.)
So when you hear stuff that suggests people think you’ve been sitting at the keyboard eating chips and typing at random, without making the slightest effort to check canon, because clearly you don’t give a damn, you think, no, I want people to know I do care. Because I’ve never forgotten when I was a kid, watching a show called It Takes a Thief. Throughout the series, the hero would say, “I’m a thief, like my father and my grandfather before me.” Then suddenly there was an episode where a woman asked him why he became a thief, and he told a story about having been a geologist and getting into thievery almost accidentally. And this wasn’t presented as a lie. You can tell the difference; even as a kid, I could tell the difference. They expected you to accept this - for this episode. A few episodes later we’d go back to the previous story.
I’ll never forget how betrayed I felt, because I loved that series with a love only a pre-teen can feel. And I thought, “Someone had to have noticed that. If nobody else, the star must have noticed. And yet nobody fixed it. Which means… I care more than they do.” It was disillusioning and depressing.
Which is why I’m a continuity believer. I know Oscar and Felix met three different ways, but in my own little world, I work to make anything I add fit. I write 600-page science fiction novels in which I create entire universes that I try to make fully consistent. So it’s a bit disconcerting when a friend points me to comments where people are saying they can't understand how TV writers can get continuity wrong in the age of Google; between that and a well-informed, accessible fandom, it would be so easy to check these things. "Maybe Doris Egan and/or Matt Lewis' mistake means that other House writers (and TV scriptwriters in general) will be a tad more careful in the future.”
And I think, no. You may or may not like the results, but dammit, it’s not lack of care or effort; I don't want that impression to stand. I want people to know that’s not the way I work. I believe it would be disrespectful of the love people invest in the characters.
None of this means you won't see errors in my writing, in TV or in books; it just means those errors will be there because I'm an idiot, not because I don't take my work seriously.
Let me quote for a minute from a response I made to a comment:
“I'm not saying there may not be continuity issues, here or elsewhere; but it's also legitimate to note that when characters speak colloquially they talk the way people talk -- they round numbers up or down, and they joke. I've never forgotten that once on the X-Files Mulder told his ex-girlfriend, "I'm cursed with a photographic memory." I assumed at the time he was saying in his smartass way that he couldn't forget the hurt she'd caused him, and I was taken aback by the number of fans who interpreted it absolutely literally and felt it was later contradicted by canon. I'm not saying that it might not have turned out to be literal; I'm just saying that when people talk, they don't speak with the exactitude of Wikipedia. Similarly, when a woman says that she's 38, one may choose to believe it or not. When the guy fixing my sink argues with me about the cause and says, "Look, lady, I've been doing this for 20 years," I don't count backwards to exactly that month 20 years before and assume that's when he got his plumbing license.
Again, I'm not saying the House timeline is free of continuity tangles. I know for a fact it's not. (And since I'm often trying to patch new and old canon together, may I say, boy do I know.) But there seems to be a certain amount of slack that's understood in real life that is not always offered to fictional characters. We actually discuss this when debating our options with lines of dialogue -- and I mean, not only writers, but actors and directors. How if a certain line were changed to something more specific it might fit better, but it would sound weird. You do the very best you can and hope that that part of the audience that's paying close attention will understand.”
So, Doris, you’re claiming it will all make sense if we just aren’t literal?
No, I have specifically not said that. I would love if it did, but it’s unlikely to ever happen. (Though I have a personal timeline that I believe actually would make sense, if you’re not absolutely literal, of House saying he’s practiced for 20 years, his present age, knowing Cuddy when she was an undergrad, etc. But it’s dependent on some things you’re probably never going to see in the show, including what I like to believe happened during “House: The Lost Years,” so let’s not pretend it’s going to solve anything.)
The post is saying something else. It’s saying - well, simply that I care, that I try, that these characters are important to me and I make a concerted effort to fit whatever I’m doing into what’s gone before. I’m saying that Matt and I pulled every reference to House and Cuddy’s shared past, had our work double-checked, argued things out with a number of people, discussed the fan Wikipedia reference where the assumption about Hopkins had been made, and even came up with internal character reasons why Michigan was first and how he got into Hopkins. (Nothing you’re ever going to see, again, but you want it to hang together in your mind if you’ve got to write it.)
So when you hear stuff that suggests people think you’ve been sitting at the keyboard eating chips and typing at random, without making the slightest effort to check canon, because clearly you don’t give a damn, you think, no, I want people to know I do care. Because I’ve never forgotten when I was a kid, watching a show called It Takes a Thief. Throughout the series, the hero would say, “I’m a thief, like my father and my grandfather before me.” Then suddenly there was an episode where a woman asked him why he became a thief, and he told a story about having been a geologist and getting into thievery almost accidentally. And this wasn’t presented as a lie. You can tell the difference; even as a kid, I could tell the difference. They expected you to accept this - for this episode. A few episodes later we’d go back to the previous story.
I’ll never forget how betrayed I felt, because I loved that series with a love only a pre-teen can feel. And I thought, “Someone had to have noticed that. If nobody else, the star must have noticed. And yet nobody fixed it. Which means… I care more than they do.” It was disillusioning and depressing.
Which is why I’m a continuity believer. I know Oscar and Felix met three different ways, but in my own little world, I work to make anything I add fit. I write 600-page science fiction novels in which I create entire universes that I try to make fully consistent. So it’s a bit disconcerting when a friend points me to comments where people are saying they can't understand how TV writers can get continuity wrong in the age of Google; between that and a well-informed, accessible fandom, it would be so easy to check these things. "Maybe Doris Egan and/or Matt Lewis' mistake means that other House writers (and TV scriptwriters in general) will be a tad more careful in the future.”
And I think, no. You may or may not like the results, but dammit, it’s not lack of care or effort; I don't want that impression to stand. I want people to know that’s not the way I work. I believe it would be disrespectful of the love people invest in the characters.
None of this means you won't see errors in my writing, in TV or in books; it just means those errors will be there because I'm an idiot, not because I don't take my work seriously.