Getting it right...

[sleigh]

This is in response to a post by cakmpls, who asked "If a narrative is telling me about both things I know about and things I don't know about, and it is getting the things I do know about wrong, how do I know whether I can trust it to get the things I don't know about right?"

That's an issue I have to discuss with my creative writing students often enough: if you-the-author tell me that Cleveland is a city along the Ohio River, then I'm out of the story as a reader. I won't believe any of the other 'facts' in your story, either -- even if I don't know whether they're right or wrong.

The quickest way to a rejection slip is to get common facts wrong because you didn't bother to do the basic research. But that's the lowest level of research. No matter what you're writing about, there are almost certainly things your character will know that you-the-author won't... and you need to know them to write convincingly about them. Yeah, research is almost an imperative for science fiction and fantasy, but I don't care what genre you write: you'll still need to do the requisite research.

What's your protagonist's occupation? Unless it's also yours, you'll need to do the research so that you can describe the job, how it's accomplished, what skills you need, what the particular lingo of the job might be (I doubt there's any job that doesn't have its specialized terminology; you need to learn it.) How much does it pay? What educational background does your character have to have to perform it? And so on...

Where is your character? -- unless it's the same city you've lived in all your life, the least you're going to need to do is get a city map, dig a bit for city history, find the city demographics, and learn the neighborhoods and their special characteristics. It sure wouldn't hurt to visit the city or at the very least find photographs of the area your character will be in so you can describe it.

Is your character the same age as you? The same gender? The same economic class? Educational level? Race? If the answer's 'no' to any of those -- you've got lots of research to do to get it right.

Here's my take, though: the job of the author is to do enough research to convince the 'usual' reader for your genre or that type of book that you know what the hell you're talking about. If I'm writing a story set in Louis XIV's France, it's incumbent on me to pick up not one but several books on the period and read them, take good notes, and make certain my work of fiction reflects my reading of those books.

BUT... I can research endlessly for the next two years, but I won't ever be able to fool a historian of the period. The expert will always find errors in what you say -- hell, even if a historian wrote the book, another historian will dispute the facts.

You can't fool the experts, but you have to fool the average reader.

As a writer, you also can't let research consume you utterly. You get paid to write books, not research. You can research endlessly to find what they actually served for dinner in Versailles on May 15, 1653 because you have a scene set on that day, but that's not getting your book written. Make it up! There comes a point where the amount of research expended isn't worth the feeling of verisimilitude it adds to the work. Where's that line? I can't define it exactly; but I know it's there.

Let me repeat an earlier statement: the job of the author is to do enough research to convince the 'usual' reader for your genre or that type of book that you know what the hell you're talking about. Any more research you do past that point you're doing for yourself, not the reader.

There's a quote by Emerson I've always liked: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Fiction is meant to entertain. Poor research and factual mistakes can toss a reader entirely out of a book, and you have to get that stuff right. But endless, exhaustive research in a hopeless attempt to get every last little detail right? That's Emerson territory.

Comments

[lauriemann.livejournal.com]

There is another issue, however -

How reliable is your narrator?

Some errors are deliberate, used to show something about the narrator.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

An "unreliable narrator" is a whole 'nother issue. I'm not talking about a narrator or POV character who doesn't have the requisite knowledge and thus says something that's factually untrue. If that's the case, the author has to make the mistake or you break character (which is also a nasty mistake).

I'm talking about situations where it's obvious the writer just hasn't done his/her homework.

factual mistakes

[grrm.livejournal.com]

Of course, us SF and fantasy guys have it harder than mainstream writers in this regard, since sometimes our "factual mistakes" are intentional, and meant to suggest that this story takes place in an alternate world, or one where the laws of nature are different, where the earth is flat, or...

I recall back when I first turned in JOKERS WILD (the third Wild Cards book) to Bantam. When John Miller's storyline took his characters out to Ebbets Field for a Dodgers game, circa 1986, the copyeditor caught the "mistake" and appended a lengthy correction to inform me that that Dodgers have moved to Los Angeles in 1957 and that Ebbets Field had subsequently been torn down.

So maybe there's some alternate world where the Madrid Quake of 1811 changed the course of the Ohio River, so it now flows into Lake Erie rather the Mississippi, and...

Re: factual mistakes

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

In the WILD CARDS universe, all bets are off! :-)

Yes

[markiv1111.livejournal.com]

Back in the old days when I still thought of myself as a writer, I was in the situation where I pretty much *had* to write science fiction or fantasy, because I simply did not (and do not) know enough about the real world to write mainstream. My first published story ("Ghost Dance," in the Winter 1985 *Weird Tales*) was set in a small town bar in current times, with a bandleader not that different from what I would have been if I'd chosen to live in a small town, because that was the only kind of story I could possibly have written -- and even so, there was a glitch. (A musician friend of mine caught it. Nobody else did.) My two Liavek stories worked as well as they did because there were numerous pages of background that we all worked from. I sometimes wonder if I might have written an occasional "just plain mainstream" story if somebody had given me pages upon pages about the real world....

Nate B.

Re: Yes

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Ah, you make my point! Yes, your musician friend is the 'expert that you can't fool,' but you fooled everyone else, and that's what counts.

I find speculative fiction both easier and harder to write than mainstream. Easier -- because there's an inherent freedom in creating a world that doesn't exist. Harder -- because that world has to be internally consistent with itself, and thus I have to do the requisite research and worldbuilding to make that happen.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Let me repeat an earlier statement: the job of the author is to do enough research to convince the 'usual' reader for your genre or that type of book that you know what the hell you're talking about. Any more research you do past that point you're doing for yourself, not the reader.

Then there's the opposite problem, where historical facts abound not because they’re helping the plot or the characterization or the period feel of the work but because the writer researched the heck out of the period and by Ghu, the reader is going to have to read about it! I was never able to read a popular series of mysteries set in feudal Japan by one Writer Who Shall Remain Nameless because when I tried her first book, in one scene the protagonist was being taken by a servant to a wing of the house and during that walk the writer bludgeoned in a lump of irrelevant facts (”He knew that in a house of this type owned by this class of person, the house would consist of this many rooms decorated in this way…”)

I realize it's a hard line to draw but I'd rather have too few historical touches than be bludgeoned by too many lumps of them.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

That's what I call the "I suffered for my art, and now it's your turn" syndrome. :-)

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

>Is your character the same age as you? The same gender? The same economic class? Educational level? Race? If the answer's 'no' to any of those -- you've got lots of research to do to get it right.

Also potentially if the answer is yes.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

True.