Writing Things Right
Terry Odell
My second cataract surgery was yesterday, and if everything went as smoothly as the first one did, I should be around to respond to comments.
I’m not a fan of the old “Write What You Know,” mostly because if I followed that guideline, I’d bore my readers (and myself) to death. “Write What You Can Learn” always made more sense to me.
The problem arises when you’re clueless that you don’t know something and merrily write along, enjoying the story.
Hint: Readers don’t like inaccuracies.
In Finding Sarah, I needed a way to keep her from doing the obvious—taking the bad guy’s car keys and driving away after she bonked him on the head. I gave the car a manual transmission, and parked it headed against a tree. Pretty clever, right? A wise critique partner told me that the Highlander I’d chosen for the vehicle (inside nod to my writing beginnings) didn’t come with a manual transmission. I had no idea you couldn’t get every car in whatever configuration you wanted.
Then there are the gun people.
Robert Crais made the unforgiveable “thumbed the safety off the Glock” error in a book, and I asked him if readers gave him flak about it. His response? “Every. Damn. Day.”
John Sandford had the same issue once when he’d been using the term “pistol” and decided he wanted to get specific, so he changed it to a Glock, not realizing he’d already had a character releasing the safety. His response? “It was an after-market addition.”
I know darn well I’m clueless about weaponry, so I do my homework before arming my characters.
What about other areas? The current manuscript, Deadly Adversaries, seemed to be throwing roadblocks every time I wrote a scene. Wanting to make sure what I’d written was at least plausible, I asked my specialist sources.
***Note. It’s important to rely on reliable sources if you want to get things right. As Dr. Doug Lyle said in a webinar: Google something you know a lot about, and see how many different explanations you get. The internet can be helpful, but don’t take it as gospel.
Sometimes solutions are easy. If I have a fight scene, I give my martial arts daughter the basics, letting her know who’s fighting, who’s supposed to win, if anyone’s injured, etc. She comes back with the basic choreography and I put it into prose.
Sometimes solutions are not quite so easy. I had a great scenario for immobilizing my victims. I ran it by my medical consultant, and he said, Nothing is impossible but this is as close as it gets. The drug would have to absorb through the skin in very small doses and very quickly. Cyanide and sodium azide can do that but they are both deadly—very quickly. I’d find another way to incapacitate your character.
Back to the drawing board.
In my Blackthorne, Inc. series, which center around a totally made up high-end security and covert ops company, I can give my characters technology, equipment, and just about anything else they need. In and out like the wind is their motto. The scope of plausibility is wide.
Not so with my Mapleton books. They’re contemporary police procedurals at heart, and I want them to be as accurate as possible. To this end, I ran a couple of scenes by my cop consultant. He told me my headlight fragments probably weren’t going to help the cops identify the vehicle involved. Okay, I could work around that.
The next question was about my cops questioning someone in jail. Eye opener here. After some what if this’s and what about that’’? the bottom line: usually what you get at the time of the arrest is the last bite at the apple. So, the information I needed my cops to discover had to come from someone else instead of going to the jail to interview him after he was arrested.
Back to the drawing board again.
The biggest—and most troublesome—stumbling block in this book was that the story played out in numerous jurisdictions. I couldn’t have my cops go to their suspects, or even witnesses, without a local LEO along, or at least notified.
Once they knock on the character’s door, they’re just civilians. Outside of their jurisdiction, they’re not cops. What I’d written was just plain wrong and my decent, play by the rules Mapleton cops would never have done it. If they had, they could have been charged with false imprisonment.
So much for my exciting climactic scene! It would be nothing but paperwork and judges and extraditions. Nothing edge-of-the-seat in those scenarios.
As my cop friend put it, Funny how most people don’t get how complicated the laws make everything.
I went back to the drawing board a lot on these scenes.
By the time we’d had dozens of back-and-forths, and I’d reached a plausible, “that could work” resolution, he said:
I’m laughing. You try to do it right. See how boring Hollywood would have been it they had to keep within that pesky Constitution. It stood in my way many times.
What about you, TKZers? How do you make sure you get things right? Have you ever not realized you thought you knew something and then found out you didn’t? Do you write first, fix later, or research first? Or ignore the issue altogether–it’s fiction, after all.
Available Now
Deadly Relations.
Nothing Ever Happens in Mapleton … Until it Does
Gordon Hepler, Mapleton, Colorado’s Police Chief, is called away from a quiet Sunday with his wife to an emergency situation at the home he’s planning to sell. A man has chained himself to the front porch, threatening to set off an explosive.
Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”
“Back to the old drawing board” may have originated here:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/415668240577733286/
Thanks for this, JG. At least my errors didn’t have the same kind of consequences.
🅠How do you make sure you get things right?
🅐Research via the library and Internerd, mostly. Books on Carl Jung and Hitler. A beta reader. The OSS psychological profile on Hitler.
🅠Did you think you knew something, then found you didn’t?
🅐Oh, yes. I thought Swiss university students would applaud Professor Jung. They didn’t; my phenomenal beta reader told me that they rapped on their desks, instead. An editor said German soldiers couldn’t have cameras. But das Heer bought dozens of cameras to be taken along for the invasion of Poland.
🅠Do you write first, fix later, or research first…?
🅐Some of each. As I near the finish, I check any loose ends.
🅠…Or ignore the issue altogether as fiction?
🅐If there’s a shaky detail, I can just omit it or substitute something else. I discovered late that the Bern OSS office with the secret entrance wasn’t opened until 5 months after June of 1942. I put this and all known deviations from fact in Appendix D. E.g., the balcony at the Deutscher Hof in Nuremberg wasn’t added until after 1931.
Also in Appendix D: ‘Let no one say that this book is inaccurate. It’s based on so many non-facts that “inaccurate” hardly describes it…Most of it is factual, but certain things have unabashedly altered in the interest of cinematic or literary impact, or simplicity…’
But Carl Jung really was OSS Agent #488!
Which is why I veer away from history in my books. The thought of that kind of research makes my teeth itch. Kudos to you for your attention to accuracy.
Well, Dad was Navy, and one of his recurrent admonishments was, “Half done is just begun…” so getting things right has been ingrained since… forever…
Therein is the challenge: how DO I make sure I get things right?
Pop researched first and then wrote a little, but this almost obsessive correctness seemed to have derailed a work on Florida pirate/privateer Wiliam Augustus Bowles – at his passing we found books, and notes and tear-sheets from magazines, and photocopies of all manner of things from the firearms and uniforms of the time to sailing terms and tales of lost treasure to maps and the culture of the Creek and Seminole in the Flori-Bama stretch of the Gulf Coast… and a couple dozen pages of manuscript… While he and Mom made pleasurable daytrips to museums and libraries and historical sites (she did cross stitch or read), but I believe the rabbit hole of what’s to be found swallowed his creative output…
I fight this OCD-ness in myself by writing along until I find something I’m not 100% sure of, sort of write around it while in the groove (unless it becomes a roadblock), and when it’s “quittin’ time” do a bit of research for the next day’s reread and (slight), edit…
As to “back to the old drawing board…” – the key word in that phrase is “old,” as in this day and technical age it’s all done in CAD – “back to the computer screen…” but just doesn’t have the same ring to it…😋
“I fight this OCD-ness in myself by writing along until I find something I’m not 100% sure of, sort of write around it while in the groove (unless it becomes a roadblock), and when it’s “quittin’ time” do a bit of research for the next day’s reread and (slight), edit… ”
More or less my process, too, George. Thanks for sharing.
George, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you picked up all of your father’s research and finished the job? It sounds fascinating and I reckon he’d thank you for it.
I claim a south Florida maritime heritage as my father was raised on a charter boat based in Miami from 1922 to at least 1934. I have traced the history of the vessel, the Caliph through 1934. I wish I knew more about it. Grandfather ran junkets to Bimini-nearest legal booze to Miami.
This is something I’ve put on my “bucket-list” – I gleaned a lot of the “extraneous” research, and have the general outline from some notes and what “manuscript” exists… (I feel a bit like Jeff Shaara who picked up completing his father’s Civil War series that started with the _Killer Angels_.
On another note, I have a WIP that’s stalled for South Florida history (Miami and the Keys), during the 30’s and 40’s. I was raised in Coral Gables in the ’60’s, and had a great uncle who worked on the Florida East Coast Railroad… Dad grew up down there from the mid-’30’s through his going into the Navy in the early ’50’s, his dad worked for Eastern Airlines for about 40 years (so my SF heritage is rail and aviation… 😁)
… small world (until you look around…)
Write what you can learn–much more exciting for both writers and readers when we follow this instead of write what you know (which as you said would bore us all to death). Sometimes learning new things is the most exciting part of our stories, like the time I sat down with a Texas Ranger for help plotting a crime or the five day handgun training and simulation I attended. In fact, I try to find something I don’t know to put in my books so I have a reason to learn and experience something new. The protagonist in my current WIP is a long haul truck driver and already I’ve learned enough to have a new appreciation for what they do. Thanks Terry.
You’re welcome, Lori. When CJ Box was researching The Highway, he did a ride along with a trucker couple. (I think my research on a working cattle ranch was more fun!)
Doing research for Dangerous Connections sent me down an entirely different path and ended up with a totally different story than the one I thought I’d be writing.
“Write what you can learn” needs to replace “write what you know” because it’s perfect! The whole reason I write is discovery. Otherwise it’s pointless. But research is daunting. While I wish I “just knew” everything without having to research, it doesn’t work that way. The older I get, the less I feel I know. LOL! And as with the scenario George referenced above with his Dad, my tendency has been lots of research, but not a lot of writing production. So you still have to keep that balance.
And getting the details right is another shout out for the importance of beta readers. On a story I co-wrote, one of the betas pointed out that the camera flashbulb of the time period we were writing would be a greater distraction to those in the crowd when it went off vs. the more unobtrusive cameras/flashes we’re used to today. My co-writer and I had discussed this as a research point, but in the crunch of finishing the manuscript, forgot to go back and double check that detail. Thankfully someone caught it.
I just need to resign myself to the idea that somewhere along the way, someone is going to call me out on some detail, because there are a million details to be researched for any given book. I just need to do the best I can and keep learning. And the other challenge is keeping track of your research in an organized manner so you can refer back to it. I struggle with that.
Experts, be they “consultants” or “beta readers” help avoid mistakes. I prefer the immediacy of posing questions to my contacts. My beta readers get the manuscript after it’s finished, and by then there might be massive editing/rewrites.
And, you have to resign yourself to knowing that even your “experts” might have different answers depending on their backgrounds, etc.
“Write what you can learn.” I like that! I run gun things past my young gun friend. ATV stuff, too. Otherwise I research the stuffing out things I don’t know. Great post, Terry!
For me, knowing what I have to research is the issue. I know I need to look up what constellations would be visible in Salem, Oregon at 10 PM on August 17th, but I had no clue you couldn’t get any make/model of car with a manual transmission.
Because I want authenticity in my books, I do a ton of research. I used to research before I wrote one word, but I’ve refined my approach. Now, I delve into research when I reach a scene that requires me to do so. In some cases, I may leave myself a comment and come back to it. If I can’t find the answer online or there’s conflicting information, I reach out to consultants. My readers check my facts, too. I’ve had many reviews say things like, “I Googled to make sure it was correct. Sure enough, she nailed it again!” Love those remarks. 😉
That’s my approach, too, Sue. For me, my stories change along the way, so I’d hate to spend time researching something that wouldn’t end up in the book after all.
I largely stopped reading a well known author when he added a back seat for the bad guy’s henchmen in a rather famous 2 seater.
Not famous enough, I guess, Alan!
“Write what you can learn” should be every writer’s motto, Terry. I strive for accuracy and hope to achieve it. My husband is annoyed by bartending mistakes. Heineken does not have a twist-off cap. And Jack Daniel’s always has an apostrophe. I once had a battle with an editor over Jack
Daniel’s and finally sent her a photo of the label.
At least you were beyond the “I’ll reject you because you made what I thought was a mistake” stage.
Then there’s the whole whisky/whiskey issue.
I am one of those fact checkers. Being an Elaine Viets fan led me to KZB. Being a computer geek sometimes means getting a paragraph or a page and a question to make sure the computer use is right in her books. It is fun when I get to see my modest input in the finished book.
One of my writing buddies is a computer programmer. I count on him to fix my tech goofs, which are abundant.
Your input is not modest, Alan. And you saved my bacon when I accidentally lost a good portion of my book — right before deadline. Thank you, thank you again.
With some help from Will, of blessed memory.
Oh, you have a sports car in that book. I checked that the description was right before I sent you the recovered file.
Great post, Terry.
I do some research before I start writing, particularly the big picture issues. While I’m writing, I leave notes reminding me to check a fact or research a detail.
The difficult issue is not knowing what you don’t know.
I used geography of Eastern Europe in my last book, Perfect Strand. I checked the maps. What I forgot was the time period for those scenes was 14th century. Fortunately, one of my betas pointed out my blatant error.
I hope everything goes well with your post-op course, and you heal quickly. There’s nothing quite like being able to drive at night again.
Thanks, Steve, and everything seems to be going well with my day after surgery. I have an appointment with my eye doc later this morning, and he’ll be the one to say how well the procedure went. I’m seeing colors in a whole new way. (And I don’t care if I never drive at night. Makes the Hubster feel useful.)
In an attempt to “get it right” while writing a fireman’s story, I interviewed three different firemen. One I met in the grocery store, the second was an old friend, and the third was someone at crime scene writers. I got three different answers to my fire scene, including “its fiction, write whatever you want. Make it up.” When I blended everything I learned into the scene, I ran it by the crime scene guy and he told me if it played out that way, my fireman would get killed. 🤷♀️ so at the end of the day, I wrote what I learned, and added a disclaimer that anything I got wrong was my fault, because three different sources gave me three different answers.
Thanks for sharing that experience, Karla. I like the third answer, but I still try to get the scenes into the bubble of plausibility. And, I follow something I read in Harlan Coben’s acknowledgments, which I include in my notes from the author. “It’s FICTION. I get to make stuff up!”
I’m reading the 6:20 man by Baldacci at the moment and I’m impressed with his talk about start-ups and investment firms and their rounds of funding as part of the story. On the other hand I recently read Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew book set at Lake Tahoe and she left her people in the water too long when they fell off their water skis. That lake averages 55 degrees in June-that fact kept interfering with my enjoyment of the story. I don’t know enough about guns to even attempt to put one in my stories beyond the word ‘gun’.
Having an area of expertise, no matter how small, can sometimes ruin a read when you spot author (and editor) errors. I’m reading a book set in 1963 Los Angeles, focused on the Black community, but the author is dropping names and places right and left. While they do add color (and so far, authenticity) to the prose, sometimes it seems a little too heavy-handed. But I had to smile at the mention of the character going into an Owl drugstore. I remember those. I grew up in Los Angeles and was around, albeit still in high school at that time.
There’s a need for balance when it comes to how much research to put on the page.
I do research before, during and after writing my mysteries. I worked at the library for 32 years and saw a lot of change, which meant a bit of struggle to remember how certain things were done back in the 1980s. I reached out to fellow retired librarians who had worked back then, did online fact checking etc.
Anything else that’s important—a point of police procedure, or how a lien on a property works, I’ll research online at my library system, check out a book etc. Magazine databases can be very helpful.
While drafting, I’ll make a not to research, unless it’s something so important that I need to know it before it creates a serious plot problem (that’s relatively rare), in which case, I’ll stop and do the research.
Afterwards, my beta readers help tremendously in keeping things accurate.
Heck, Dale. Sometimes, I can’t remember how things were done last week. I prefer to research as I go. I’m not Jeffrey Deaver, who spends 8 months plotting, outlining, and researching each book. That’s not how my process works. And predicting the future? By the time a book is written and published, it’s already out of date or will be soon. Or just wrong. I read a number of books that mentioned the pandemic being over while it was still actively infecting people.
Terry, I love the Abe Lincoln graphic! It’s perfect…
My go-to guy for car stuff and gun stuff is my husband. Even though I know a fair amount about guns and how to shoot them, he knows more. For medical stuff- also something I know a fair amount about-I have some leftover doctor friends from my years in that field. Also, for wild animal stuff, we have a good friend whose career was taxidermy. And he didn’t just stuff other people’s kills-he is an expert hunter and photographer. I grilled him about cinnamon bears (no pun intended) for my first novel.
I usually stop and figure things out while I’m writing the scene, which might not be the best approach. It tends to jerk me out of the zone, but my brain just can’t handle the path unless I know where I need to get to.
Thanks, Deb.
Having people who have reliable expertise is a boon. The Hubster is a biologist with a specialty in marine mammals, but his knowledge of lots of aspect of science comes in handy. Like the time I asked him for a good way to poison a cat. (No, I didn’t kill it!).
Haha!
I might have to hear his answer, Terry. Our neighbor has 6 cats now, and our Hoka the German Shepherd strenuously objects.
🙂
Or, you could read Finding Sarah. 🙂
What gets me is the number of people who say you are wrong because they saw it on TV, the worst medium in the world for accuracy. Twenty years later, I’m still salty about an agent turning me down because the boat explosion in the first chapter was inaccurate. It wasn’t.
TV and movies are NOT reliable sources, and you’d hope an agent would fact check if that’s the only reason for a rejection.
My research methods are surveying the literature and reading the cases, and when you keep coming up with the same or similar answers from diverse sources you’ve covered the waterfront.
I learned my research chops in law school and I was in the last class at my law school that took the research and writing class and had to do it in the stacks. No computer assisted legal research. Folks may think it was terminally inefficient, but I maintain that getting your basic training in the stacks makes you a much better user of computer assisted research.
It was painful. When folks come to town and I give them the Cook’s Tour I point to Opperman Hall and say “I served a three year sentence in that building.”
And I can tell you all that I am glad that dreadful part of my life is over for good.
I take a wide angle view of “write what you know”.
To me that means the sum total of your experiences from the moment of conception to the present moment. Maybe even before comception if you dig reincarnation.
In college, research was always done in the stacks. Or in the dorm with the books you were allowed to check out. There were no computers yet. I recall seeing ads for keypunch operators when I rode the bus (and I wondered what that meant), so there were computers, but nothing of the home/work/school variety.
Thanks for stopping by.
Good topic, Terry. I am also clueless about weaponry. Fortunately, my dev editor is knowledgeable, and she corrects me when I try to put a safety on a gun that doesn’t have one.
I have enjoyed the sessions I’ve had with police and fire professionals. Also, physicians like our own Dr. Steve Hooley keep me in line on the medical front.
I’ve gleaned a lot of information from attending the Writers Police Academy over the years. This year, it’s a special “Murder Con” focusing on homicides. I’m looking forward to it. Which I’m sure my “normal” friends find strange!
Glad your cataract surgery went well, Terry.
I’m fortunate to have great experts to tap for specific topics–medical, legal, guns, cars, etc.
Plus I often “stumble” across experts. My WIP is set in a cherry orchard on Flathead Lake. Simply mentioning that in conversation has led to a surprising number of people saying, “Oh I worked at my parents’/grandparents’ orchard.”
For another book set in at a fire lookout in the mountains, I was amazed at how many people I ran across who’d worked as fire spotters or had spent time at lookouts.
Always nice to find people who have knowledge of what you’re writing about. I’ve had a few moments of serendipity traveling on planes and sitting next to people who had knowledge/expertise of subjects I could use in my writing.