I’m often a terrible person to watch a movie with, especially one that references historical events. Be it 300 or Raiders of the Lost Ark, I’m the kind of guy that has to clamp down when I see folks get historical facts wrong.

But I got to eat my own slice of writer’s humble pie soon after my first novel, The Tripods Attack, was published by Sophia Press. While just about everyone loved the story, gentle readers pointed out a few spots where I got the name of an office holder, someone’s middle name, or even someone’s eye color, wrong in my finished text.

Oops. What hadn’t been obvious to me had been a big blunder indeed in the eyes of others. It also was a good lesson to me as an author.

Getting your facts right for characters in historical or contemporary fiction involves more than just a trip to Google. Sometimes, finding a right answer can require more time than seems worthwhile. You could find yourself drowning and wading through information in an effort to find a factoid that someone versed in the field has on the tip of their frontal lobe.

(Hmmm….is the frontal lobe where information is stored? Better check that…)

Humility is often the best virtue to accomplish a goal, because if we use it right we’ll admit our weaknesses and find a better source of strength. And, sometimes, seeking help yields unexpected results that are more beneficial than you initially thought they could be.

In one of my stories, I needed to know how long a person could live if their hand was chopped off. One person I knew through work, a member of the medical profession, was kind enough to help me with this after a meeting. Her answer? If the character managed to get a tourniquet on and managed to cauterize the stump, they could live quite a while without difficulty.

Great! I’d gotten my answer in ninety seconds, one I’d spent too much time searching for already. Best of all, a popular character was going to live rather than die at the end of my novel! I didn’t find out until a number of fan-based mails later just how smart a move this was…

Later on with the same project, a good man who was both a literary scholar and a priest helped me with events in the lives of historical Catholic authors. After this, an old college buddy in law enforcement gave me jargon useful to fictional FBI agents. The list grew as my manuscript did, and my list of correct facts about anatomy, the lives of various historical characters, law enforcement and physics ‘ranneth’ over. And, when The Emperor of North America, the title of my sequel to Tripods, came out, I’m proud to say that thus far no one has found a blatant factual error.

Typos, now. There’s a challenge I still have…

When you use consultants for your facts, everyone wins. You get correct information and credibility in your readers’ eyes. Your consultants get their names in print on your Acknowledgments page, and the knowledge that they helped you in your writing apostolate.

And, God willing, you might even encourage a consultant to be a writer themselves one day!

5 Replies to “Oops, I Did It Again…Getting Facts Right in Your Fiction”

  1. A second pair of eyes proofing sections is helpful just checking the authors fictional facts. I wrote a snow blizzard scene complete with a power outage. Proof reader read it, liked it then asked, “Why was Job’s porch light on during a major power outage?” Oops! I re-worked that section to replace the electric light with a Coleman gas lantern in the living room window. Nice to catch such things before publishing.

  2. Yes; Small bits of info like that can be vital, if you want to ensure that the world you’ve created is intact and believable.

    For me, that’s an even bigger challenge: Getting factiods right that were ‘right’ for only a specific space of time in history.

    A few decades from now, for example, if someone were to write a story about a cool kid wearing spats, sideburns and a black leather jacket in the 70s, when polyester pants and an afro might be more skin to the time period, we might make a facepalm and put the book down.

    I can get away with this a bit, but only because I can play the ‘it’s alternate history’ card. Even then, I can only push it so far. 🙂

    JDM

  3. Thanks for this article. Not long ago I wrote on fact finding in historical writing. There are hidden incidentals that some readers will catch, though most might not. It is understandable that an athor might not even imagine there are fact to check on. An author today could err not knowing the current title for E-4 was different 40 years ago. The story may still read well. The E-4 rating in the Air Force was Segeant, Buck Sergeant specifically when I was in, mid-70’s. Today E-4 rating is called Senior Airman. There was a brief transitional period for this change to take place.

  4. Great points, John! My biggest problem is getting the courage to ask folks for their expertise. But once I get past my shyness, I find that people are generally quite willing to help out. Plus, they have colleagues, and voila, a network is born!

    1. Precisely! Different people will have different reasons for wanting to help you.

      Sometimes they want to assist in your apostolate, other times they just like talking about their jobs.

      One point I couldn’t squeeze in up top: also try to pick folks who can write *concisely*. The wonderful MD I mentioned up top is especially good at taking concepts that others took *books* of text to describe, and compress them down to a few sentences or pages. Sometimes, even with photos snapped! Ditto for the priest/Lit professor, and my friend in the State dept. Clear & concise is the way to go…and once you have a network, it’s ‘way easier to figure out who’s best to ask and who’s better to put on hold for a bit. 🙂

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