Research Responsibilities

[e_moon60]

This was 'ported over from the Paksworld blog, on the grounds that it might interest others who don't read fantasy.   If you read it there, it's pretty much the same.

Ritual disclaimer: nobody gets through a long writing career without some mistakes.  You will sometimes trust the wrong research source (even if it’s someone who should have the

Comments

[harvey_rrit]

You have reminded me of why it took me an extra hour to watch Avatar. I had to keep stopping the disc to make fun of errors.

Not just scientific ones. A guerrilla force defeating regular troops in battle. A career military commander casually betraying his troops. And then living to do it again.

(God, it is a sin and a shame the people you meet when you ain't carrying a flounder!)

[gauroth]

Oh my, Avatar! I'm not a scientist, and my knowledge of warfare comes mainly from reading fiction (Ms Moon, the 'Sharpe' books) but even I noticed the points you made! And then there were the bits taken from 'Apocalypse Now' and the 'Final Fantasy' games and Disney's 'Pocohontas' that were bolted onto the story for no reason, and.. oh deary, deary me!

[tuftears]

<3

I didn't know about the paksworld blog-- I'll start checking it out now!

[e_moon60]

Hope you enjoy it. We have a great group of people over there and include "spoiler spaces" for discussing recently released books without ruining them for people who haven't seen them yet.

[baobrien]

One of my favorite memories from college is a history field trip where we spent one night in a hotel room drinking beer and watching an epic "historical" movie set in ancient Rome. Among other criticisms, a professor noticed that they were using stirrups...

("The Great River" was the best class I ever took - the history and literature of the Mississippi River valley, very rigorous work, met for 4 hours every Saturday morning so community members could take the class, too. Everything from how locks and dams worked to Frances Trollope's opinions of Americans.)

[blueeowyn]

A friend of mine and I watched Ben Hur on the big screen together. We made sure we weren't anywhere near anyone else as we pointed out to each other the problems. To be fair SOME of them were based on assumptions of the time that it was made that aren't true (they now know a lot more about Triremes since building one and testing it ... my friend was one of the rowers on some of the sea trials). Some of the errors were just stupid mistakes (moving the horses around in the hitch in the chariot race).

[e_moon60]

That sounds like a fantastic class

[kengr]

One of the classic "oops" things in older versus newer interpretations:

I recall when the "correct" view was that the *losers* were sacrificed in those Meso-American ball games.

Now it's that the *winners* were.

And that's a lovely example of *alien* cultural attitudes.

[kengr]

And folks reacting badly to errors can happen in "ordinary" stories too.

For one, don't write sex scenes if you aren't familiar with the anatomy involved. Or at least don't try to describe said anatomy.

And believe it on not things like clothing sizes and how a female is "built" qualify as specialist terminology and should be avoided unless you know the vocabulary. (having someone grow from 36 B to 44D requires magic or nanotech, not hormones!)

Oh yeah, folks who are bad at spatial relationships *really* need too have someone who is good at them proof things. Or trying "acting out" things. This avoids readers going "But there's no *room* for that!!!"

[e_moon60]

Oh, lordy, those sex scenes that involve too many or too few limbs, or not enough room, or unrealistic...whatevers. Book after book in which a partner's long, luxuriant, over-described tresses never get caught under a body part of the other partner. And they're just as bad in lit-fic as in genre fiction

[kengr]

There's *reason* I set things in my stuff in places I've lived. Including houses of myself or friends. Makes for much easier visualization of what is where.

Mind you, that's only workable if you are good at visualizing that sort of thing.

And back when I was DM doing D&D, I'd cut out those house plans they printed in the Living section of the Sunday paper. Handy if you needed a house plan suddenly. :-)

[e_moon60]

What a clever idea! The next time I need a modern sort of house, I'll head for the real estate section and just make whatever changes the story needs.

[gifted]

Giggled at the hair-pulling / book-throwing.

Elizabeth, you're a breath of fresh air.

[e_moon60]

I should mention that some people who think they've found an error in a book know LESS than the writer...the same lack of knowledge that afflicts writers can afflict readers. For instance, Judith Tarr--whose historical works are meticulously researched--was told by a copy editor to change the name of a city from Constantinople to Istanbul...when the story was set at a time that the name WAS Constantinople. One copy editor with no military experience but a high level of sensitivity to a different class of error wanted me to have a character say "Staff the weapons." Then there was the fellow ready to blast me for being ignorant enough to have the wrong admiral in the Royal Navy's Adriatic Squadron in August 1914...when the story was a) alternate history and b) having a different admiral in charge was the point of change.

[xrian]

Margaret Frazer, who writes murder mysteries set in the mid-1400s, apparently gets a constant stream of critical comments from the ill-informed who maintain that nobody investigated murders in this time period or tried to find out who really did the killing -- they just hanged the nearest suspicious person. This is, um, contradicted by a whole lot of period evidence, as she points out: the main difference is that murder investigators were not called "detectives" which is indeed a more modern word.

(This is aside from all the people who think everyone in the Middle Ages was dirty and never washed, that spices were used to cover up the taste of spoiled meat, that no one lived beyond 40, and all the other oooooooooollllllllllld and long-refuted ideas about the medieval period.)

[redvixen]

Let's include people don't know when different spices were introduced so they use the wrong ones, use the wrong weapons in different time periods, don't really know how certain animals act and react, and all the other ways that misinformation gets perpetuated as being "accurate".

Personally, if I find information that is new to me and it doesn't sound right I'll look it up. Or ask my husband because he loves trivia. Although sometimes I don't think he knows what he's talking about.

I'm willing to overlook a lot of realism in favor of a good story but mistakes that make me stop and wonder destroy my enjoyment. Reading forum discussions of people criticizing elements of a book with their own misinformation makes me laugh most times. Of course, I'm not a published (in a professional sense) author so I don't have to deal with it.