Your AI contradicted chapter 3. Now what?
A chapter lands and something in it is wrong — not badly written, wrong. The sister is an only child. The locked door was open two scenes ago. The character who died is giving advice.
The instinct is to rewrite the scene. That is the one move that guarantees it happens again, because the thing that produced the contradiction has not changed. Here is the order that actually holds.
First, decide which version is true
Do not default to the earlier one. You wrote chapter three months ago, under a plan you have since improved. Quite often the contradicting version is the better story and the right move is to change chapter three.
Pick deliberately, and write the decision down somewhere that is not your memory. Half of all repeat contradictions are a writer who decided once, did not record it, and decided the other way six weeks later.
Fix the fact before you fix the prose
The contradiction is a symptom; the record is the cause. If "Mara has a brother" lives only inside a scene, nothing stops the next scene contradicting it too. Correct it where the fact is kept — the character entry, the place, the note on what happened — and only then touch the paragraphs.
This is the step people skip, because fixing the prose feels like progress and fixing the record feels like admin. The next three scenes will tell you which one mattered.
Find everything downstream
A contradiction has children. If the door was locked, someone did not get in, and someone else drew a conclusion from that. Walk forward from the first wrong scene and list every later moment that leaned on the broken fact.
Do this before you rewrite anything. The list is usually shorter than you fear — two or three moments — and knowing it stops you rewriting a chapter that was fine.
Rewrite the smallest thing that restores it
Almost never the chapter. Usually a paragraph, sometimes a sentence. The reader does not need the scene regenerated; they need the three lines that reference the wrong fact to reference the right one.
Rewriting wholesale costs you the parts that were working, and those are the parts you will not notice are gone until you reread it in a month. Smallest viable fix, every time — and save a restore point first, so a fix that makes it worse costs you nothing.
Then make it structural
Once it is repaired, the question worth asking is why nothing caught it. A contradiction that could only be noticed by a human rereading eighty thousand words is a contradiction that will recur.
The structural answer is that the facts live as records rather than as sentences in a transcript — a character with a role, a want and a thing that holds them back; a place with what it is; a scene that names who is in it — so a later scene is written against the current state rather than against whatever is still in the window. Some of it can then be checked on its own: a character who vanishes for four turning points running, a lead who does not change at the midpoint.
Common questions
Should I fix contradictions as I go, or at the end?
As you go, for the fact. At the end, for the prose. Correcting the record takes a minute and stops the error propagating into the scenes you have not written yet; batching the paragraph rewrites is fine and often better, because by then you know which of those scenes survived at all.
The AI keeps making the same mistake after I corrected it. Why?
Because you corrected the prose, not the source. In a chat the only memory of your correction is the message you typed it in, and that message scrolls out of the window like everything else. Until the fact is stored somewhere that is re-read on every request, every new scene is a fresh chance to get it wrong.