When research goes wrong
I was reading this entry earlier, about mistakes that can pull you out of the story when the author hasn't researched properly. It made me think about how frustrating I often find research.
Research can be really fun, but as I said in the comment of that entry, sometimes I forever feel like I'll never get certain things right. Like, there are things you don't even realize you need to research or that seem instinctual and even if you do research it you might get the wrong idea.
I remember, for instance, an episode of "As Time Goes By," the sitcom with Judi Densch and Geoffrey Palmer. There's a storyline where a miniseries is being made of their story within the show and there's lots of jokes about how clueless their American producers are and how they change their story to suit their weird ideas about the UK. For instance, Lionel must have a nanny growing up, and live in a mansion, and they must say good-bye from "London Station." All because this is allegedly what the folks in Idaho think England is like.
Of course, since they're joking about getting local details like that wrong, it sticks out when the show itself gets little things wrong. For instance, two characters fly to the Plaza Hotel in New York to watch the (awful) miniseries. They've made a big deal about the mini-series airing on CBS, but then also make a point of having the girls turn to "channel 4" at the hotel--which would be NBC, then. CBS in NYC is on channel 2.
More obvious, I remember a whole joke about Lionel saying he has to "take a leak" and the American producers being confused at this veddy British expression...except that's also an American expression. If I hadn't seen that show I might have assumed it was exclusively an American expression, in fact.
Not that these things were a big deal, but they just point out how hard it is to just get everything right when you're writing about someplace else, and when they're making a point of it in the dialogue, you wish they'd stop. Especially if it's something that's common knowledge to you personally--you can't help it. You wonder why they didn't ask someone, but sometimes even asking someone will get you the wrong information. (I wonder if the writers of the show met an American who had never heard the expression "take a leak?" Or asked somebody in a different state what channel was CBS and didn't realize it differed depending on the market? Who knows?)
I remember once on lj a conversation about HP being fundamentally British and someone saying that you know it's British because the kids ride a train to school, and we have no trains in the US. Well, first, the Hogwarts Express is an old-fashioned train, not a modern one, so yes, that's perfectly American.
But secondly, I've ridden trains all my life--what's more, I knew a lot of people who went to boarding school and they all took trains to that school (not chartered trains like the HE, of course, but trains to the town where their school was). Both of us could have led an earnest researcher astray--if they listened to the OP, a writer might mistakenly have American characters living in a train-less society. If they listened to me, they might mistakenly write a Northeastern-style train culture in states where it didn't exist.
Once I swear I remember somebody doing a post about the correct way to write Catholicism that to me, who grew up Catholic, was completely bizarre. I think part of it was old-fashioned rules--people wearing lace veils to church and so forth, but I think it also assumed too much about the official rules, as if a character who was Catholic couldn't use birth control, be pro-choice, be divorced. Research of Catholicism might suggest these things, but experience of Catholism is a lot more varied. The same is probably true for all religions, the complicated relationship a character can have with the faith into which s/he was born and the many ways the same faith can look differently on different people. Yet at the same time, it's not like anything goes.
It's frustrating because so often the only thing you can really trust are the things that clank painfully on the ear of most natives. I remember a YA book I read years ago that was British and set in Britain, but the main character was an American exchange student. It wasn't all that bad, except that the author had unluckily made the main character's favorite word one that I have never in my life heard an American use. Every time he used it it was like CLANK!
Anyway, I'm rambling, but I love stuff like this. Even if you want to be easy-going about it, it's really hard not to get thrown out of the story by this kind of thing. I love hearing peoples' pet peeves about stuff that throws them out of a story--sometimes it doesn't even have to be your own culture. I remember an HP story I couldn't stand because the Trio were constantly wrestling and hugging each other. It seemed like partly an American thing the way the physicality was written, but it was also just not the way these characters ever behaved as characters. Does anybody else remember reading advice about correct cultural stuff that seemed wrong to them?
Research can be really fun, but as I said in the comment of that entry, sometimes I forever feel like I'll never get certain things right. Like, there are things you don't even realize you need to research or that seem instinctual and even if you do research it you might get the wrong idea.
I remember, for instance, an episode of "As Time Goes By," the sitcom with Judi Densch and Geoffrey Palmer. There's a storyline where a miniseries is being made of their story within the show and there's lots of jokes about how clueless their American producers are and how they change their story to suit their weird ideas about the UK. For instance, Lionel must have a nanny growing up, and live in a mansion, and they must say good-bye from "London Station." All because this is allegedly what the folks in Idaho think England is like.
Of course, since they're joking about getting local details like that wrong, it sticks out when the show itself gets little things wrong. For instance, two characters fly to the Plaza Hotel in New York to watch the (awful) miniseries. They've made a big deal about the mini-series airing on CBS, but then also make a point of having the girls turn to "channel 4" at the hotel--which would be NBC, then. CBS in NYC is on channel 2.
More obvious, I remember a whole joke about Lionel saying he has to "take a leak" and the American producers being confused at this veddy British expression...except that's also an American expression. If I hadn't seen that show I might have assumed it was exclusively an American expression, in fact.
Not that these things were a big deal, but they just point out how hard it is to just get everything right when you're writing about someplace else, and when they're making a point of it in the dialogue, you wish they'd stop. Especially if it's something that's common knowledge to you personally--you can't help it. You wonder why they didn't ask someone, but sometimes even asking someone will get you the wrong information. (I wonder if the writers of the show met an American who had never heard the expression "take a leak?" Or asked somebody in a different state what channel was CBS and didn't realize it differed depending on the market? Who knows?)
I remember once on lj a conversation about HP being fundamentally British and someone saying that you know it's British because the kids ride a train to school, and we have no trains in the US. Well, first, the Hogwarts Express is an old-fashioned train, not a modern one, so yes, that's perfectly American.
But secondly, I've ridden trains all my life--what's more, I knew a lot of people who went to boarding school and they all took trains to that school (not chartered trains like the HE, of course, but trains to the town where their school was). Both of us could have led an earnest researcher astray--if they listened to the OP, a writer might mistakenly have American characters living in a train-less society. If they listened to me, they might mistakenly write a Northeastern-style train culture in states where it didn't exist.
Once I swear I remember somebody doing a post about the correct way to write Catholicism that to me, who grew up Catholic, was completely bizarre. I think part of it was old-fashioned rules--people wearing lace veils to church and so forth, but I think it also assumed too much about the official rules, as if a character who was Catholic couldn't use birth control, be pro-choice, be divorced. Research of Catholicism might suggest these things, but experience of Catholism is a lot more varied. The same is probably true for all religions, the complicated relationship a character can have with the faith into which s/he was born and the many ways the same faith can look differently on different people. Yet at the same time, it's not like anything goes.
It's frustrating because so often the only thing you can really trust are the things that clank painfully on the ear of most natives. I remember a YA book I read years ago that was British and set in Britain, but the main character was an American exchange student. It wasn't all that bad, except that the author had unluckily made the main character's favorite word one that I have never in my life heard an American use. Every time he used it it was like CLANK!
Anyway, I'm rambling, but I love stuff like this. Even if you want to be easy-going about it, it's really hard not to get thrown out of the story by this kind of thing. I love hearing peoples' pet peeves about stuff that throws them out of a story--sometimes it doesn't even have to be your own culture. I remember an HP story I couldn't stand because the Trio were constantly wrestling and hugging each other. It seemed like partly an American thing the way the physicality was written, but it was also just not the way these characters ever behaved as characters. Does anybody else remember reading advice about correct cultural stuff that seemed wrong to them?