Gawd, it's been a while--
I swear, I update more regularly than this. I do.
So, today, I will rant on the subject of writerly imagination. Or lack thereof.
Exhibit A: You Could Make It Up.
This is a wonderful two page essay by a writer I'd never heard of named Lynne Truss. In it, she admits to not researching her fictional works. Not simply 'only googling the big things' --but never even bothering to visit the places where she set the action. Not asking some men their thoughts, before she composed a series of dramatic monologues about masculinity. Sacrilege!
. . . Uh, sacrilege?
See, now she's got me thinking.
To be honest, prior to reading her essay I was in that boat with (it seems) a great deal of the unpublished writing public: I took a great interest in getting details factually accurate, and I did Google searches almost as a nervous tic whenever I didn't know the answer to even the most minute question.
In some ways, this has served me well: when I got involved in FMA, I went so far as to join a website and forum community for snipers and I messaged some of the members there for help. I think it was probably a good experience for me, although, man, those guys intimidated me. Did you know that Army Sergeants can radiate exasperation and overtried patience through a computer screen and five-hundred odd miles of internet apparatus?
Well, neither did I. See, that was productive research.
But I happened to read Truss' article at a time when I was also becoming increasingly exasperated (to the point of vituperation, and I am typically the most mild-mannered of net-trolls) with little_details. Why?
Let me --with no unkindness intended to those quoted-- give you a sampling of some of the questions set to that community lately.
1) What did the interior of the Moulin Rouge look like?
2) What are some fairytales involving siblings that are set in [geographical region]?
3) Can you cut diamonds down into smaller gems?
etc.
I'm not pissing on the idea of research: I would be standing in the world's biggest glass house, with a high-powered rock cannon at 'Go' if I tried. Neither am I attacking these authors specifically, because as of right now they're just the three most recent posters on LD, and I wanted a sample to illustrate my point.
And my point is?
Take a look at those questions. Tell me: what prevents the author from just exercising a little imagination, and answering the question with an answer unique to their story and possibly, just possibly, not strictly correct? I think I can speak for a significant percentage of the reading public when I say that I do not expect my fiction to be precise on all points: I am unlikely to spend an hour searching Google to determine whether the Moulin Rouge actually did have a chandelier that could be lowered through the ceiling and from which the girls occasionally performed trapeeze acts. If the writer decides that's how it is, and they make the details of that chandelier convincing (is the gilt peeling off? or is it just paint? Electric lights, or open flame?) --or, for that matter, if the chandelier is simply wall-dressing and is treated as such-- I am unlikely to care whether any of the above ever actually happened. So if your story calls for a girl to swing through the bars of the chandelier and catch on fire, well, uh, props to you for creativity, and why the heck do you need permission from some dour armchair historian on little_details, to include that in your story?
And if you cannot, just cannot bring yourself to profane the Moulin Rouge with a chandelier and a flaming trapeeze artist that never existed, well, make up your own slummer's haunt. You won't get the name recognition that you will when you say "Moulin Rouge" --but given Baz Luhrmann and that amazing rendition of "Roxanne," maybe you shouldn't be trying to compete.
I've picked the Moulin Rouge question here to single out, but the same applies to the other two questions as well --applies, in fact, to 99.9% of the questioned posed to the community. If no fairytale exists, make one up. If you don't know, say it can happen. Run with it until someone can show you definitive proof that it can't. Maybe keep running with it, even after they have.
For example: one of my favorite books by Ann Maxwell is The Ruby. Jeweler type character gets a special delivery from her father, from whom she's estranged. She opens the box. Inside she finds a gigantic ruby --and, a la Pandora and her box, with that ruby comes a whole host of problems ranging from Soviet hitmen, poisonous tycoons, and one really incredibly hot bodyguard-type, who also has "do not touch, likely to make you sorry" signs all over him.
At the end of the story, we discover that the ruby was actually manufactured as an information storage matrix that can be read by laser --think of the film that's on CDs, but in three dimensions. It's a brilliant idea. Is it feasible? Possible? Likely? Hell no. But that's why Ann Maxwell is very often one of my favorite writers: her inventiveness knows no bounds. Some Evil Overlord should hire her to do their thinking for them.
So, we have a giant community on LJ that is full of people who would rather ask the necessary questions and get their details right, than imagine the answers and be potentially (perhaps damningly) wrong. Some of the questions are surely tedious, but the sin seems to be minor. What's wrong with wanting to be sure that you're right?
Well, what's wrong with being wrong?
The answer, in fact, seems to depend on a number of factors. First of all: the writer's own confidence in their delivery and craft. Second: the amount of recognition, particularly positive recognition, that the writer has received, with publishing being the highest possible accolade. Third: the essential quality of the mistake. I'm sure there are others, but these are the three I really want to address in this post.
We'll start with #3 first, because I think it's the simplest. There are mistakes, and then there are mistakes. If you write that a ruby is the same thing as a spinel, I will know you are wrong. I wager that a lot of readers wouldn't, but this is one of the benefits of reading Ann Maxwell: she teaches you all kinds of things.
This kind of mistake is basic, factual. It is: is this so? It is not so. It's also the sort of mistake that a writer who is well-informed on their subject and premise will not make. Fuck, it's the kind of mistake that you can catch with Wikipedia, if you really must go into that much depth on a subject you have not researched and are not confident about.
Basically, it's a "laws of the known world" mistake. Writers can survive making these mistakes: all that's required is that the writer give the reader a sufficiently compelling reason to ignore the inconsistency. Good prose will smooth over all kinds of errors for the typical reader. Of course there are those atypical readers --experts on the subject, Google-whores, Soulless Wraith Kings, etc.-- who will not care about your delivery, but will be offended by your inconsistencies. But be honest with yourself: if you cared so much about their opinions, then shouldn't you have written to them for help with your research, back when you first conceived the project?
There are other mistakes. These are mistakes of depiction, mistakes of description, mistakes of not-quite-making-your-reader-feel-how-you-meant. These are the larger mistakes that result from writing in great detail, or great generality, on topics about which you are not qualified to have an opinion. And when I say, "Not qualified," I do not mean: you do not have a degree in the subject. What I mean is: you have failed to establish authority that allows you to have an opinion within the context of your story.
Did I lose you? Okay, we'll try it this way. You are a forty-something white man, living in Lawrence, Kansas. You are writing about a thirteen year-old girl in Hong Kong who has a ruptured kidney and is rapidly and messily dying, alone in her parents' home. If you have established a character, if you have a plot and a purpose and themes that are going on (even subconsciously) this scene will write itself. You will know that this is a girl who is used to being taken care of: her family is wealthy, and her father dotes on her. She is a quiet, civil child. She does not understand what is going on, only that she is in tremendous pain and the stranger standing by her bed is not helping her. You will write these things into your story, even if you never mention them, even if you never ask yourself the questions which they answer, because you have a sense of the characters and the tendancy of the story that you have created, and this is how she would act, and this is how it would go. Because you want it that way, because it needs to be that way, because this is how it was. (Which of the three statements you would use says, I think, a great deal about your relationship with writing. But we'll go into that some other time.)
Later, you are welcome to investigate whether the lamp on her bedside table would actually be Cloisonne. Perhaps you discover that Hong Kong, and the Chinese in general, have outlawed Cloisonne as art-too-monstrous-for-public-consumption. (They would not be far wrong, in general.) Then you have the option to make the lamp porcelain, or plastic, or whatever you like: or you may keep it Cloisonne because the blurring lines of gold and the vivid lacquer have a special meaning for your character and your story, because the law does not matter in that little bedroom, does not have any meaning to that whimpering child, or that merciless observer.
Is this a factual mistake? Yes. Is it meaningful? That depends on your story, your focus, and your skill. If you write a sufficiently compelling account, something that is true, on human level, I should think that your readers will not be thinking about whether the Chinese have prohibited Cloisonne.
Will someone doubtless still write to you, complaining because you did not do your research? I am sure. And then you may write back and gently explain that, yes, your editor mentioned it was factually inaccurate, but you chose to keep the ugly Cloisonne lamp. And if you are a very nice sort of author, you may even thank them for their concern and assure them that you enjoyed hearing from them. If you are bucking for sainthood, you may even mean it.
I acknowledge that what I am discussing here is a kind of misdirection. But isn't all fiction? All writing? Look here, see my point. See the evidence I bring you. See the characteristics I describe, the environment I create. Believe, for a space, only in the reality that I establish for you.
Does fiction have no responsibility, then, to be accurate in its particulars?
Well, of course it does. But I think what I'm really arguing here is that writers need to learn to limit their particulars. If you insist on taking song lyrics from a Beatles song and incorporating them into a scene, yes, you must get them right. But you can establish the same sense of setting in other ways. Thus, the debate about fiction, accuracy, and detail, becomes a matter of craft, and (in my opinion) about self-reliance in art --not looking to established authority, but establishing your own.
So, when I ask "What's wrong with being wrong?" what I am really saying is, you must define Accuracy for yourself.
This is something I believe that many published authors, and many more unpublished but confident authors, have done for themselves. If nothing else, the market has validated their feelings on the subject: they have sold their work. They are making some kind of living from their art. They have won --insofar as one can win at an art.
Keep in mind: publishing does not necessarily mean that your definitions are good ones, only that a certain number of people in a publishing house thought so, and perhaps that a certain contingent of the reading public agrees. A published writer may, in fact, come to hate her work because she finds that the things about which she troubled herself to be Accurate, were not in fact the things about which she most wished to be Right. Ie: the precise caliber of the pistol did not matter, but the character's experience of being shot was not well-rendered, and the characterization up to that point had been spotty, so what should have been a tragic death was instead a superbly detailed, grotesque, and slightly comic flop. Well, at least the critics thought it was intentional.
However, publishing (like most positive recognition) generally has the effect of validiating the writer's standards about what constitutes truth, and honesty, and meaning. So I think published writers are likely to be more blase in their relationship toward authority and toward accuracy derived from authority.
Your average fandom author, publishing online at places like ff.net or skyhawke.com, does not get money in their bank account for the experience. They cannot look to their tidy little mound of savings and say, "Yes, well, I must have gotten something right in all that, and here is my vacation in Bermuda as a reward." At best, they have nice comments from reviewers. If they have reviewers like me, they have probably gotten it in one ear and out the other about the importance of Accuracy in the English Language (this is one of my Holy Accuracies) and they probably did not get richer (by any definition) through the experience. So they may question their own judgement --or mine, if their definition of what's important in a story varies significantly enough from the one I've posited in my review. In any case: the best they can hope for sympathy and validation: at worst, they may be attacked or chastized for failing to get it right. Whatever "it" is.
I find that this is the group where the relationship between accuracy and authority is the most entertwined and the most derived --sometimes to the cost of their prose. Often, actually, to the cost of their prose. It can be wonderful, and tremendously reassuring, to know that the Moulin Rouge did in fact have a flaming trapeze artist, and that her name was Lisa. But it may also be confining: should your character's name be Lisa? If it was already Lisa, should you change it? Should you model your character's costumes off hers? Does the fact that your other character resembles her real-life-lover mean that you should rethink the character --or that you should make the resemblance more than accidental?
Sometimes the answer isn't really the answer at all --in short. Sometimes you don't need to know the specifics. Sometimes the caliber is irrelevant, and the Cloissone Act doesn't matter to the little girl who lies dying in her bed at twelve-twenty-two, under God's watchful eye. Sometimes the free exercise of your imagination will be more meaningful to your reader than pages of meticulously researched description.
What the writer needs, then, is the faith in her own craft. Some authority cannot be derived. Your characters and your setting are yours first: you make their rules, you define their right, and you write them from a template, an unspoken foundation of your own accuracies. Proper English matters to me. Character development matters to me. I believe that horror and pain are best depicted in absolutely stripped prose. I think conviction is more heroic, but also more monsterous, than conscience. Thus the following:
"It took nine [cuts]. Something like nine. Grating. Three for the windpipe five for the spinal column one to finish it --halfway through, my hand slipped, and I had to reverse my grip. Her vitae clung wet the cuffs of my shirt, made a cold and grimy wetness on my skin.
She held my gaze through it, until her pupils swallowed the hard brown of her irises, until even the whites were dim.
And when the edge finally met air, her hair went brittle around my fingers, and the sculptured slope of her cheek ran away, dissolved into grains of ash. I let go, and let her fall. Dust cascaded across the toes of my shoes."
You may recognize Vampire: the Masquerade in the setting; I sure as hell didn't come up with a term as pretenious as "vitae" all by myself. Nor did I make the rules about how one kills a vampire. Those are accuracies, details that I have taken from another authority.
But I have done my level best to establish my own authority and voice here, too. I don't believe in gratuitous, self-conscious gore --but my protagonist just hacked this chick's head off with a longsword. Do I know how hard that would be? No idea, can't say I've done it. But I've done my level best to imagine. This is not something Google can do for me. Google cannot tell me about the grating of the esophagus, the wet hiss of blood released, under pressure, from too many veins at once. I chose not to focus on those details, because of aforementioned aversion for gore, and also because of the point of view I've chosen. What I chose to focus on, since this is a conscious, if terribly honest, memoir, was the number of cuts. That's what the character would remember: the sawing, the slow swelling of the pupil. That's what she saw --and that tells you, without me saying it, that she killed looking into the victim's eyes. I think that tells you something about the character.
And, if I've done my job right, you feel --in the detachment and the stumbling of her voice, in the selection of detail-- my character's sense of horror at her own actions. You know what happened, but you don't see what she doesn't remember --what shock filmed over for her, what time and the privilege of rewriting her life has allowed her to forget. You get, consciously, the details that she cannot forget, and you get, indirectly, a glimpse of the degree of resolution she brings to her task. This isn't a pretty or graceful execution. It's not painless. But my character --who is also, in her way, compassionate-- partakes in her victim's suffering the only way she can.
(Also, my neck hurts now.)
Of course, you could think all the above is bullshit and that the segment I gave you was crap as well. I'll be a little hurt, but not all that surprised. It is Vampire: the Masquerade fanfic, and my idea of good writing is not everybody's. Not a lot of people's, as it turns out. But I like it, it works for me, and this is how I have tried to make my work both accurate and Accurate. I know my setting: I know the jargon, and I use it when it's appropriate. But also I have a template for the character --that she is compassionate, that she is humane and even idealistic, but that she has something at stake here over which she cannot yield. Given the situation, this the action, these are the details that express her character.
This, to me, is what people are missing with their Google searches, and this is what Truss expresses at far less length, but with far more references to her own writing (Look, I only had the one, however bad it was.)
I got to admit, I'm tempted to post Truss to the community.
And now, the part that everyone should read: the meme!
What are your underlying values in your writing --the things that you try to get across, the divides and the gaps and the terrain of your beliefs that automatically reflect in your prose. These can be stylistic, moral, political --however you like.
So, today, I will rant on the subject of writerly imagination. Or lack thereof.
Exhibit A: You Could Make It Up.
This is a wonderful two page essay by a writer I'd never heard of named Lynne Truss. In it, she admits to not researching her fictional works. Not simply 'only googling the big things' --but never even bothering to visit the places where she set the action. Not asking some men their thoughts, before she composed a series of dramatic monologues about masculinity. Sacrilege!
. . . Uh, sacrilege?
See, now she's got me thinking.
To be honest, prior to reading her essay I was in that boat with (it seems) a great deal of the unpublished writing public: I took a great interest in getting details factually accurate, and I did Google searches almost as a nervous tic whenever I didn't know the answer to even the most minute question.
In some ways, this has served me well: when I got involved in FMA, I went so far as to join a website and forum community for snipers and I messaged some of the members there for help. I think it was probably a good experience for me, although, man, those guys intimidated me. Did you know that Army Sergeants can radiate exasperation and overtried patience through a computer screen and five-hundred odd miles of internet apparatus?
Well, neither did I. See, that was productive research.
But I happened to read Truss' article at a time when I was also becoming increasingly exasperated (to the point of vituperation, and I am typically the most mild-mannered of net-trolls) with little_details. Why?
Let me --with no unkindness intended to those quoted-- give you a sampling of some of the questions set to that community lately.
1) What did the interior of the Moulin Rouge look like?
2) What are some fairytales involving siblings that are set in [geographical region]?
3) Can you cut diamonds down into smaller gems?
etc.
I'm not pissing on the idea of research: I would be standing in the world's biggest glass house, with a high-powered rock cannon at 'Go' if I tried. Neither am I attacking these authors specifically, because as of right now they're just the three most recent posters on LD, and I wanted a sample to illustrate my point.
And my point is?
Take a look at those questions. Tell me: what prevents the author from just exercising a little imagination, and answering the question with an answer unique to their story and possibly, just possibly, not strictly correct? I think I can speak for a significant percentage of the reading public when I say that I do not expect my fiction to be precise on all points: I am unlikely to spend an hour searching Google to determine whether the Moulin Rouge actually did have a chandelier that could be lowered through the ceiling and from which the girls occasionally performed trapeeze acts. If the writer decides that's how it is, and they make the details of that chandelier convincing (is the gilt peeling off? or is it just paint? Electric lights, or open flame?) --or, for that matter, if the chandelier is simply wall-dressing and is treated as such-- I am unlikely to care whether any of the above ever actually happened. So if your story calls for a girl to swing through the bars of the chandelier and catch on fire, well, uh, props to you for creativity, and why the heck do you need permission from some dour armchair historian on little_details, to include that in your story?
And if you cannot, just cannot bring yourself to profane the Moulin Rouge with a chandelier and a flaming trapeeze artist that never existed, well, make up your own slummer's haunt. You won't get the name recognition that you will when you say "Moulin Rouge" --but given Baz Luhrmann and that amazing rendition of "Roxanne," maybe you shouldn't be trying to compete.
I've picked the Moulin Rouge question here to single out, but the same applies to the other two questions as well --applies, in fact, to 99.9% of the questioned posed to the community. If no fairytale exists, make one up. If you don't know, say it can happen. Run with it until someone can show you definitive proof that it can't. Maybe keep running with it, even after they have.
For example: one of my favorite books by Ann Maxwell is The Ruby. Jeweler type character gets a special delivery from her father, from whom she's estranged. She opens the box. Inside she finds a gigantic ruby --and, a la Pandora and her box, with that ruby comes a whole host of problems ranging from Soviet hitmen, poisonous tycoons, and one really incredibly hot bodyguard-type, who also has "do not touch, likely to make you sorry" signs all over him.
At the end of the story, we discover that the ruby was actually manufactured as an information storage matrix that can be read by laser --think of the film that's on CDs, but in three dimensions. It's a brilliant idea. Is it feasible? Possible? Likely? Hell no. But that's why Ann Maxwell is very often one of my favorite writers: her inventiveness knows no bounds. Some Evil Overlord should hire her to do their thinking for them.
So, we have a giant community on LJ that is full of people who would rather ask the necessary questions and get their details right, than imagine the answers and be potentially (perhaps damningly) wrong. Some of the questions are surely tedious, but the sin seems to be minor. What's wrong with wanting to be sure that you're right?
Well, what's wrong with being wrong?
The answer, in fact, seems to depend on a number of factors. First of all: the writer's own confidence in their delivery and craft. Second: the amount of recognition, particularly positive recognition, that the writer has received, with publishing being the highest possible accolade. Third: the essential quality of the mistake. I'm sure there are others, but these are the three I really want to address in this post.
We'll start with #3 first, because I think it's the simplest. There are mistakes, and then there are mistakes. If you write that a ruby is the same thing as a spinel, I will know you are wrong. I wager that a lot of readers wouldn't, but this is one of the benefits of reading Ann Maxwell: she teaches you all kinds of things.
This kind of mistake is basic, factual. It is: is this so? It is not so. It's also the sort of mistake that a writer who is well-informed on their subject and premise will not make. Fuck, it's the kind of mistake that you can catch with Wikipedia, if you really must go into that much depth on a subject you have not researched and are not confident about.
Basically, it's a "laws of the known world" mistake. Writers can survive making these mistakes: all that's required is that the writer give the reader a sufficiently compelling reason to ignore the inconsistency. Good prose will smooth over all kinds of errors for the typical reader. Of course there are those atypical readers --experts on the subject, Google-whores, Soulless Wraith Kings, etc.-- who will not care about your delivery, but will be offended by your inconsistencies. But be honest with yourself: if you cared so much about their opinions, then shouldn't you have written to them for help with your research, back when you first conceived the project?
There are other mistakes. These are mistakes of depiction, mistakes of description, mistakes of not-quite-making-your-reader-feel-how-you-meant. These are the larger mistakes that result from writing in great detail, or great generality, on topics about which you are not qualified to have an opinion. And when I say, "Not qualified," I do not mean: you do not have a degree in the subject. What I mean is: you have failed to establish authority that allows you to have an opinion within the context of your story.
Did I lose you? Okay, we'll try it this way. You are a forty-something white man, living in Lawrence, Kansas. You are writing about a thirteen year-old girl in Hong Kong who has a ruptured kidney and is rapidly and messily dying, alone in her parents' home. If you have established a character, if you have a plot and a purpose and themes that are going on (even subconsciously) this scene will write itself. You will know that this is a girl who is used to being taken care of: her family is wealthy, and her father dotes on her. She is a quiet, civil child. She does not understand what is going on, only that she is in tremendous pain and the stranger standing by her bed is not helping her. You will write these things into your story, even if you never mention them, even if you never ask yourself the questions which they answer, because you have a sense of the characters and the tendancy of the story that you have created, and this is how she would act, and this is how it would go. Because you want it that way, because it needs to be that way, because this is how it was. (Which of the three statements you would use says, I think, a great deal about your relationship with writing. But we'll go into that some other time.)
Later, you are welcome to investigate whether the lamp on her bedside table would actually be Cloisonne. Perhaps you discover that Hong Kong, and the Chinese in general, have outlawed Cloisonne as art-too-monstrous-for-public-consumption. (They would not be far wrong, in general.) Then you have the option to make the lamp porcelain, or plastic, or whatever you like: or you may keep it Cloisonne because the blurring lines of gold and the vivid lacquer have a special meaning for your character and your story, because the law does not matter in that little bedroom, does not have any meaning to that whimpering child, or that merciless observer.
Is this a factual mistake? Yes. Is it meaningful? That depends on your story, your focus, and your skill. If you write a sufficiently compelling account, something that is true, on human level, I should think that your readers will not be thinking about whether the Chinese have prohibited Cloisonne.
Will someone doubtless still write to you, complaining because you did not do your research? I am sure. And then you may write back and gently explain that, yes, your editor mentioned it was factually inaccurate, but you chose to keep the ugly Cloisonne lamp. And if you are a very nice sort of author, you may even thank them for their concern and assure them that you enjoyed hearing from them. If you are bucking for sainthood, you may even mean it.
I acknowledge that what I am discussing here is a kind of misdirection. But isn't all fiction? All writing? Look here, see my point. See the evidence I bring you. See the characteristics I describe, the environment I create. Believe, for a space, only in the reality that I establish for you.
Does fiction have no responsibility, then, to be accurate in its particulars?
Well, of course it does. But I think what I'm really arguing here is that writers need to learn to limit their particulars. If you insist on taking song lyrics from a Beatles song and incorporating them into a scene, yes, you must get them right. But you can establish the same sense of setting in other ways. Thus, the debate about fiction, accuracy, and detail, becomes a matter of craft, and (in my opinion) about self-reliance in art --not looking to established authority, but establishing your own.
So, when I ask "What's wrong with being wrong?" what I am really saying is, you must define Accuracy for yourself.
This is something I believe that many published authors, and many more unpublished but confident authors, have done for themselves. If nothing else, the market has validated their feelings on the subject: they have sold their work. They are making some kind of living from their art. They have won --insofar as one can win at an art.
Keep in mind: publishing does not necessarily mean that your definitions are good ones, only that a certain number of people in a publishing house thought so, and perhaps that a certain contingent of the reading public agrees. A published writer may, in fact, come to hate her work because she finds that the things about which she troubled herself to be Accurate, were not in fact the things about which she most wished to be Right. Ie: the precise caliber of the pistol did not matter, but the character's experience of being shot was not well-rendered, and the characterization up to that point had been spotty, so what should have been a tragic death was instead a superbly detailed, grotesque, and slightly comic flop. Well, at least the critics thought it was intentional.
However, publishing (like most positive recognition) generally has the effect of validiating the writer's standards about what constitutes truth, and honesty, and meaning. So I think published writers are likely to be more blase in their relationship toward authority and toward accuracy derived from authority.
Your average fandom author, publishing online at places like ff.net or skyhawke.com, does not get money in their bank account for the experience. They cannot look to their tidy little mound of savings and say, "Yes, well, I must have gotten something right in all that, and here is my vacation in Bermuda as a reward." At best, they have nice comments from reviewers. If they have reviewers like me, they have probably gotten it in one ear and out the other about the importance of Accuracy in the English Language (this is one of my Holy Accuracies) and they probably did not get richer (by any definition) through the experience. So they may question their own judgement --or mine, if their definition of what's important in a story varies significantly enough from the one I've posited in my review. In any case: the best they can hope for sympathy and validation: at worst, they may be attacked or chastized for failing to get it right. Whatever "it" is.
I find that this is the group where the relationship between accuracy and authority is the most entertwined and the most derived --sometimes to the cost of their prose. Often, actually, to the cost of their prose. It can be wonderful, and tremendously reassuring, to know that the Moulin Rouge did in fact have a flaming trapeze artist, and that her name was Lisa. But it may also be confining: should your character's name be Lisa? If it was already Lisa, should you change it? Should you model your character's costumes off hers? Does the fact that your other character resembles her real-life-lover mean that you should rethink the character --or that you should make the resemblance more than accidental?
Sometimes the answer isn't really the answer at all --in short. Sometimes you don't need to know the specifics. Sometimes the caliber is irrelevant, and the Cloissone Act doesn't matter to the little girl who lies dying in her bed at twelve-twenty-two, under God's watchful eye. Sometimes the free exercise of your imagination will be more meaningful to your reader than pages of meticulously researched description.
What the writer needs, then, is the faith in her own craft. Some authority cannot be derived. Your characters and your setting are yours first: you make their rules, you define their right, and you write them from a template, an unspoken foundation of your own accuracies. Proper English matters to me. Character development matters to me. I believe that horror and pain are best depicted in absolutely stripped prose. I think conviction is more heroic, but also more monsterous, than conscience. Thus the following:
"It took nine [cuts]. Something like nine. Grating. Three for the windpipe five for the spinal column one to finish it --halfway through, my hand slipped, and I had to reverse my grip. Her vitae clung wet the cuffs of my shirt, made a cold and grimy wetness on my skin.
She held my gaze through it, until her pupils swallowed the hard brown of her irises, until even the whites were dim.
And when the edge finally met air, her hair went brittle around my fingers, and the sculptured slope of her cheek ran away, dissolved into grains of ash. I let go, and let her fall. Dust cascaded across the toes of my shoes."
You may recognize Vampire: the Masquerade in the setting; I sure as hell didn't come up with a term as pretenious as "vitae" all by myself. Nor did I make the rules about how one kills a vampire. Those are accuracies, details that I have taken from another authority.
But I have done my level best to establish my own authority and voice here, too. I don't believe in gratuitous, self-conscious gore --but my protagonist just hacked this chick's head off with a longsword. Do I know how hard that would be? No idea, can't say I've done it. But I've done my level best to imagine. This is not something Google can do for me. Google cannot tell me about the grating of the esophagus, the wet hiss of blood released, under pressure, from too many veins at once. I chose not to focus on those details, because of aforementioned aversion for gore, and also because of the point of view I've chosen. What I chose to focus on, since this is a conscious, if terribly honest, memoir, was the number of cuts. That's what the character would remember: the sawing, the slow swelling of the pupil. That's what she saw --and that tells you, without me saying it, that she killed looking into the victim's eyes. I think that tells you something about the character.
And, if I've done my job right, you feel --in the detachment and the stumbling of her voice, in the selection of detail-- my character's sense of horror at her own actions. You know what happened, but you don't see what she doesn't remember --what shock filmed over for her, what time and the privilege of rewriting her life has allowed her to forget. You get, consciously, the details that she cannot forget, and you get, indirectly, a glimpse of the degree of resolution she brings to her task. This isn't a pretty or graceful execution. It's not painless. But my character --who is also, in her way, compassionate-- partakes in her victim's suffering the only way she can.
(Also, my neck hurts now.)
Of course, you could think all the above is bullshit and that the segment I gave you was crap as well. I'll be a little hurt, but not all that surprised. It is Vampire: the Masquerade fanfic, and my idea of good writing is not everybody's. Not a lot of people's, as it turns out. But I like it, it works for me, and this is how I have tried to make my work both accurate and Accurate. I know my setting: I know the jargon, and I use it when it's appropriate. But also I have a template for the character --that she is compassionate, that she is humane and even idealistic, but that she has something at stake here over which she cannot yield. Given the situation, this the action, these are the details that express her character.
This, to me, is what people are missing with their Google searches, and this is what Truss expresses at far less length, but with far more references to her own writing (Look, I only had the one, however bad it was.)
I got to admit, I'm tempted to post Truss to the community.
And now, the part that everyone should read: the meme!
What are your underlying values in your writing --the things that you try to get across, the divides and the gaps and the terrain of your beliefs that automatically reflect in your prose. These can be stylistic, moral, political --however you like.