Pulled out of the
story, which had been good until then, I went to check my poison books,
then did more research online to be sure I was right. I was. And so
that story, which I had considered for republication in Black Cat Weekly, went into my No pile.
I
read another published story recently in which an amateur sleuth
was able to catch the bad guy by gathering certain information from
public records. That sounded great. How clever of her. Except the
information at hand would not have been available in a public record at
that time, nonetheless the specific public record mentioned in the
story, because this was a historical story and this information would
not have been gathered at that time. Moreover, even if the information
had been in the public record, there was no way the sleuth could have
gotten the information in the short amount of time she did because the
story was set before computers were ubiquitous. I rolled
my eyes, frustrated.
If you want to be a good writer, you have to
write a good story AND get the persnickety little details right. I'm
not saying you have to be perfect. Mistakes happen. I've made them. You
think you know something, but you have the details wrong. Or there are
things you're unaware of that can cause problems in your story. Maybe a
law in the state you set your story in would make something that happens
in your story unrealistic. Or you simply wrote an error into the story as you were typing so ardently, without even thinking to check if you got a certain detail right. This is why it's always good to have at least one reader you trust before you send the story out for submission. Some acquiring editors will take the time to work with you to fix such problems. Others will have 200 submissions for 20 spots and be happy to have a reason to say no to your story.
I know how hard it can be to have a great story idea and then learn that your story will not work the way you intended. But the solution--after doing your research and concluding you have a problem--isn't to shrug and act as if the problem isn't a problem. The solution is to look for a work-around. Be creative. Change something so the story will work. I edited a story recently that had a great voice, but it included the use of a poison that didn't work the way the author wanted it to. (This is a different story than the one mentioned above.) I couldn't think of a poison that did work the way this author needed. But the bad guy worked in a lab, so it was believable he could create an unnamed poison that did the job the author needed. It might not be a perfect solution, but it hopefully will be enough for any persnickety readers out there.
In the end, there's a difference
between making an occasional mistake and having an attitude that it
isn't important to try to get things right. Someone who makes the
occasional mistake is human. Someone who routinely makes mistakes
because he or she can't be bothered to get the details right is taking the
easy way out, and people notice. Don't let that person be you.
***
Turning to a little blatant self-promotion, I've put up on my website two of my favorite stories that I had published this year. The first story is "A Tale of Two Sisters," published in the anthology Murder on the Beach. If you like my funny stories, I hope you'll check it out. It's long for a short story, about thirty pages, so set aside a little reading time. The other story is "A Family Matter," published in the January/February 2021 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. You can read "A Tale of Two Sisters" by clicking here and "A Family Matter" by clicking here. Happy reading and happy new year!
Great post, Barb. I still remember watching some cop show back in the fifties where the detective found a gun at the scene of the murder...and picked it up in a handkerchief, which would have smudged any fingerprints on it. Sigh.
ReplyDeleteOne of my novels involved a diabetic, and I talked to two diabetics I know to get the details right about insulin shock and other problems. I took careful notes, then apparently misread them when I wrote, because a reader who was also diabetic told me I had the details wrong. Sigh again.
Considering how often I hear people cite a book (often fiction) to support some fact, it really behooves us to get stuff right. Either that or mess up the flow of the book with footnotes...
Are there still people out there who think a silencer will work on a revolver?
Thanks, Steve. It can be frustrating when you try really hard to get the details right and mess up. But as long as you were trying, you earn points in my book. (Not total points, but points!)
DeleteBLESS YOU! I think a writer who isn't willing to do their 'homework' has no business writing.
ReplyDeleteIt's vanity and an insult to the reader when they are so lazy.There is aboslutely no excuse for not getting information.
I don't remember anything about one story except that a widower was musing over his life.He said that his son was at a Tiger Cub meeting and that pretty soon, he would be a real Boy Scout. Well, #1,HE would have been at the Tiger Cub meeting, because at least at that time(and maybe now), kids did it with an adult partner. And #2, a kid then has to go through Cub Scouts, which is a four-year course before he becomes a "real Boy Scout". The writer could have called a Scout office, heck, they could have asked any 7 yr old Scout! All that stayed with me from the story is how shoddy and uncaring the writer was.
A story that I had trouble finishing was a mystery set in Colorado. I lived in Denver and the foothills for eleven years and I can tell you that a cab from the airport would not drive around snow drifts in the highway like a NASCAR racer, as the writer described. Snow never drifts into piles on the highways. The roads are almost always well-maintained, especially up the mountains, or there would be no ski-tourism, and the cabbies know what they are doing.
In both cases, I did a lot of screaming. I could go on and on. I did a blog post on the difference between "Country" and "Western". I lived in Idaho and Colorado, now I am in Kentucky, but writers confuse the two to no end. I lost it when a show had a cowboy-looking fellow ride a horse through what was supposed to be downtown Louisville, which is a surprisingly diverse and fairly sophisticated city in many ways.
You get on them, Barb! Make them do their research!
Thanks, Tonette. I should point out that there's a difference between characters making mistakes and authors making mistakes. Maybe the Boy Scout widower character was written as saying the wrong thing to show that he was out of touch with his kid. The important thing for the writer to remember is that if he/she is going to write a purposeful mistake into the story, there REALLY have to be no others because you need an aware reader to be willing to keep reading until the point it's revealed that the mistake was purposeful, that the author didn't screw up.
DeleteSorry, Barb, we were supposed to be seeing what a devoted father this fellow was, it was not a disconnect about the character. It was the author.
DeleteWell, that's disappointing.
DeleteOh yes! I once read a thriller by a favorite author, and the "vet tech" character gave her achy SAR dog some TYLENOL to ease the pain. I nearly threw the book across the room, as that's toxic to pets. (pet peeve of mine...yes, pun intended *s*)
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's the exact type of mistake I was talking about. I get your ire.
DeleteBarb, you are so right (as usual)! I cringe when I learn I've blown the details, and my enjoyment of stories by other authors fades when I discover their 'little' mistakes.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Diane. All we can do is keep trying to improve and hope our favorite authors put in the hard work so we can enjoy their work without getting pulled out of the story.
DeleteMy pet peeve is always courtroom scenes, because too many writers want to go all Al Pacino on a judge, and what happens in real life is that the attorney gets escorted out and/or thrown in jail for a while to cool off. Plus most courtroom scenes are BORING. BORING. BORING.
ReplyDeleteNot necessarily! I used to work in court reporting & a co-worker told me about the following allegedly true bit of dialogue:
DeleteDEFENSE COUNSEL: Ma'am, are you sexually active?
WITNESS: Nah, I just lie there & wait until he's finished!
Eve, have you ever read the Nina Reilly series by Perri O'Shaughnessy? It's been a long time since I've read the books (and I still have some to go), but as I recall, the series has solid courtroom scenes.
DeleteElizabeth, yes, I too have heard some great dialog from witnesses in a courtroom; and there was the memorable scene where the defendant - obviously drunk - was standing before the bench and began to heave... and the defense attorney on one side and the state's attorney on the other side started backwalking away in a perfect v-formation... Wonderful.
DeleteBarb, I'll check the Nina Reilly series out.
Great topic, Barb, and it made me decide to be less specific about the poison in a story I am working on now. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteMy absolute favorite example of this is a novel by a well-known crime writer that starts just after the assassination of ML King. The author lists cities in which riots are taking place, and included Los Angeles. My immediate reaction was: Oh, this is alternative history? Because, famously, LA did NOT have riots after that death.
On the other hand, on the day my novel SUCH A KILLING CRIME was published I showed a copy to a friend and in ten seconds he spotted an error: I had mistaken which borough of NYC an event happened in. Sigh...
Glad to be helpful, Rob. If it makes you feel better, sometimes readers think things are wrong when they're not. (That doesn't help the author's opinion in the readers mind, but ...) I remember showing a story to my boss once, and he told me I had a spelling mistake in the beginning: lede. I looked at where he was pointing, and told him, nope, that's correct, and I explained the meaning. He pulled out the dictionary and learned a new word that day. But if he'd been reading on his couch, he would have turned the page, simply assuming I'd messed up. (Along the same lines, I used "lede" in another story, and the editor "fixed" the spelling during proofreading to "lead" without asking me, also having never heard of the word "lede," so when the story came out, it looked like I had made the mistake. Sigh.)
DeleteAnd that should have been "That doesn't help the opinion of the author in the reader's mind.) Sigh.
DeleteMy friend Audrey Peterson once received a blistering letter from a reader because she described a foggy day in modern London. The reader said that since air pollution had been cleared up London no longer got fog. Uhh...
DeleteUhh indeed.
Delete
ReplyDeleteGreat Post Barb! Oh, how many times I have stopped reading because of mistakes. Things like, "that song came out in 1929 and this was supposed to be set in 1925" - for Pete's sake, can't you even look it up on Google? I am particularly careful, writing historical fiction, because there are scholars who read it. My Rowena Through the Wall fantasy series involved Roman troops fighting Bodicea at one point - and you can bet, one British scholar wrote me to say he had figured out the legion I was talking about, and he was so excited! My latest book out next year takes place in 1928. Boy, I had to be careful about cocktails, music, fashion, etc - even names of dishes like Lobster Thermadore. Every single thing had to be looked up.
And I may not have spelled Thermadore correctly - look it up, gal! grin.
ReplyDeleteThat's one reason I rarely write historical fiction. It can be exhausting checking every little detail. (Editing it is no picnic either.) I admire your stamina, Mel.
DeleteIn another context, my boss once said, "Anyone can design a good ad campaign if they have an unlimited budget. It takes real talent to create one within the constraints." If we're writing realistic fiction, the real-world facts are our constraints. Does this analogy work for you?
ReplyDeleteYeah, that works. It's exactly on point.
DeleteYears ago I wrote a novel about an insulin dependent woman who is kidnapped. I felt I had done sufficient research. But the first editor who read the work shot me down. His sister was diabetic and he knew that I got tons of facts wrong! Ouch.
ReplyDeleteDo your reasearch.
It can be hard when you don't know what you don't know. For very technical areas, it might be good to have a subject-matter expert read the pages in question to see if you've made any mistakes. I was fortunate to have a former firefighter/investigator give me information for a fire scene in the past year, and then a different person, a fire chief, read the resulting scene to see if I got the details right. It took a bit of time, but it made me feel better that I won't (I hope!) have anyone complaining I screwed up when the story comes out.
DeleteOne of the stories in our slush pile hinged on the hero opening an oxygen valve in an empty room at the hospital and then using a lit match tossed into the oxygen stream to "detonate" the O2 in a "MASSIVE EXPLOSION!" to rip the locked door off its hinges and send it careening down the hallway in "the fireball". A rather cool scene, actually, save for the pesky fact that oxygen is not an explosive.
ReplyDeleteThose pesky facts ...
DeleteGreat blog! Yes, research, please! Check dates and numbers too. I've seen a character described as in his 30's and a year later 40ish. Being involved in committing or solving a crime can age one, but...
ReplyDeleteEither skip the character's age or know what you wrote.
Yes, it's important to keep track of such things. That said, sometimes a character in his 30s (his late 30s) will, a year later, be 40ish.
DeleteLet me put in a plug for my favorite courtroom short story: "Privilege," by Frederick Forsyth, in his book NO COMEBACKS. It was made into a wonderful short film starring Milo O'Shea.
ReplyDeleteI recently mentioned giving up counting errors and anachronisms in Django Unchained, followed up with Tarantino bragging about his research. Seriously?
ReplyDeleteMy teacher/writer/editor friend Sharon screeched to a halt reading one of her favorite romance authors who staged an event in the back of a certain American car. It's not for me to say Sharon had spent a lot of time in the back seat of this particular model, but she knew the car and knew it didn't have the feature the authoress described. Sharon was aghast.
I've been an avid reader of a certain forensics thriller writer, admiring the details of his plots and scenes. He ventured into a different subgenre, one I know well, and blew it big time. A colleague mentioned bringing the book to lunch and reading passages for the immense entertainment of his associates. That is not a place an author should wish for. Worse, I never quite trusted the details after that.
Yes, details rule.
I look forward to the stories, Barb! Happy new year.
Happy new year, Leigh!
DeleteI’m just finishing a book where several scenes take place in a tiny English village and a major character is a retired Canadian Mountie. Getting details right took a lot of work but was great fun. Just to be sure about the Canadian references, I sent an ARC to a Canadian writer who graciously read it and said the research paid off and the referencs were correct.
ReplyDeleteThat's the way to do it!
DeleteGreat post, Barb; one of the few where all the comments are just as interesting as the post itself. And a good reminder to be careful with what I write.
ReplyDeleteI remember my debut novel. I used revolver and pistol interchangeably, as if they were synonyms. My publisher and copy editor didn't know it either. Well, to our defense I can add that guns are very rare in the Netherlands.
Thanks, Anne! I think a lot of people believe pistol and revolver are synonyms. So if you have a character who wouldn't know a lot about guns, you could have him/her use pistol and revolver interchangeably in dialogue as evidence of his gun ignorance. But it's probably better to have him/her simply use the word gun rather than pistol and/or revolver so readers who know the difference between pistols and revolvers won't think you the author don't know what you're doing.
DeleteGreat reminder, Barb, and fun comments! I think we owe it to our readers to get the facts as right as we can, because they assume we know what we're talking about and that they're learning something about poisons, diseases, history, and so on. As well, doing the research often reveals just the right fact -- one you never suspected -- that gives the story a new angle or twist, or the details to make the story come alive in a way it might not have without that extra time and effort.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's always fun when you learn a little detail that can really bring the story to life, sometimes with a surprising twist. Readers appreciate that.
DeleteSpeaking of guns, Brian Garfield used to get so many letters from people complaining (correctly or otherwise) about gun details in his books that he deliberately wrote a book with no guns in it. He got complaints from people who said "He should have had a gun."
ReplyDeleteJames Powell one of my favorite writers of humorous short mysteries, wrote: "If you go into a large public library you will see a pale crowd of men and women researching books or articles they plan to publish or preparing for courses they intend to teach. And these are all noble things. But there are other researchers there, an even paler crew who accumulate knowledge so they can write letters to the editors of mystery magazines peppered with words like 'egregious' and 'invincibly ignorant.' 'Dear Editor,' they write, 'in your issue of November last I was astonished to find a character in a James Powell story releasing the safety-catch of an 1864 sleeve Derringer, model 302, a.k.a. 'the Elbow Smasher.' I think not. That particular model Derringer did not come with a safety-catch until January of 1865.'"
LOL.
DeleteBarb, based on the high number of comments your blog article received, I would say you hit on a hot and timely topic. Keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteThanks, R.T.
DeleteI agree, Barb, you really *ought* to sweat the small stuff — when readers catch you in an error, it's pretty much guaranteed that they don't think the stuff was small.
ReplyDeleteThe legendary Edward D. Hoch once wrote a story in which a passenger on a Rhine cruise was killed and dumped overboard, and then his body washed ashore several hundred kilometers south. The only problem is that the Rhine is one of those rare rivers that flows north, not south.
My favorite comeback when caught in such a faux pas came from my old Cleveland buddy Les Roberts, who writes the Milan Jakovic PI novels. In one book, Milan shadows a person of interest to a Monday performance by the Cleveland Orchestra. On publication, Les received hundreds of letters from irate Clevelanders, pointing out that the city's orchestra never plays on Mondays. Les wrote a response, had it photocopied, and sent it to everyone who complained. I'm paraphrasing here, but basically what he said was "your Cleveland Orchestra might not perform on Mondays, but my Cleveland Orchestra performs whenever the hell I tell them to!"