Imagine, if you will, a reader curled up on her couch reading a romantic suspense set in early March, in New Hampshire. She grips the book more tightly as the hero pursues the villain. When the bad guy makes it to his car, the hero leaps into his own restored, cherished, hand-waxed 60’s Corvette and gives chase, racing down narrow, winding roads.
Now imagine that reader laughing so hard she drops the book. And with the suspenseful mood shattered, the reader wanders away to mop her floors.
What happened? The reader, being from NH, knew that even if the hero was dumb enough to take his classic ‘Vette out of storage before the hard spring rains washed away the winter’s build-up of road salt, she knew he wouldn’t go a half-mile or so before a frost heave ripped the undercarriage right out from under his car. The reader later looked up the author’s bio online and discovered she was born, raised and still residing in some southeastern desert town. (She did finish the book, though, and she enjoyed it.)
So what’s an author to do? When the best thing about your back yard is that it’s only 1.6 miles from Walmart, that write what you know mantra sounds especially grim. But who has the money and freedom to hop a plane in order to get the real deal on book’s setting?
I collect travel guidebooks, picking them up at yard sales and used book stores. (Want to tour Greece in 1986? I’m your girl!) Needless to say, the Internet can bring the world right to you. But nothing can help you know a place as well as the natives.
I once read a comment by an author (and I still can’t remember who—sorry) explaining that she wrote of a heroine stopping to pump gas in Oregon, and she promptly received letters telling her you can’t pump your own gas in Oregon.
What surprised me even more than not being able to pump gas in Oregon was the fact that readers took the time to write to her, pointing out the error. When some aspect of an author’s New England setting makes me pull up short, I either roll my eyes or have a little chuckle, but I don’t hold it against the author. I wouldn’t write to her, and, while I wouldn’t forget it, it wouldn’t keep me from buying her next book.
What about you? Have you ever read a book set in your back yard in which the author didn’t have quite the right details? Would you write her a letter or send her email? If you write, have you ever been called on something like that, and how much do you sweat it?
No related posts.
This is why I’ve set all my contemporaries in my part of Virginia. Even with lots of research, it’s hard to get all the little details right if you aren’t really familiar with a place. I know when the dogwoods and azaleas bloom here, I know what the summer feels like, I know how often it rains (or doesn’t). I know there isn’t snow on the ground from October to April. And so forth.
My favorite example of really atrocious research about my backyard isn’t a book, it’s a movie: Disney’s “Pocahontas.” Jamestown has no freakin’ mountains, no humongous waterfalls, and no cliffs overlooking the river. None. Nada. I can’t imagine what Disney was thinking when they made that movie… surely major movies have a big enough budget that they can visit an area before they write the script? Or maybe they just didn’t care. But deliberately altering the setting you choose isn’t a good thing, either. Messing up the setting, either by design or by accident, tends to tick off your readers (or viewers).
I’m chicken *wry grin*, but I really prefer to write books set in my own backyard.
I had a reader tell me that I couldn’t put a tree house in the type of tree I’d used, that it wouldn’t bear the weight. And I married him.
I avoid books set in DC for this very reason, but sometimes I don’t know the setting in advance or decide for some reason to take a chancce. One of my favorite booboos occurred in a book in which the advice was given to always remember that the state-named streets go east-west and the numbered streets go north-south. Follow that advice and you’re going to be in a heap of trouble real fast since the exact opposite is true.
You can’t your own pump gas in NJ either.
It’s the little things that trip you up. If you don’t know it, don’t include it.
I recently read Alison Kent’s “The Bane Affair” Being an “upstate” New Yorker I loved seeing so much of it set north of the George Washington and Tappan Zee Bridges, but I have to admit I was looking for mistakes. It was detailed enough to tell she’d either been there or had done great research and yet vague enough that I couldn’t pick it apart. Personally, I wouldn’t take a Ferrari into the Adirondack Mountains, no matter the time of the year.
I like books to be as accurate as possible. If I read a book that is “set in my backyard” and the facts are wrong, I would probably not finish it, depending on how many things were wrong. I have a hard time with books that feature heroes or heroines in my profession because so many authors that aren’t in the profession get it wrong. I think Kathleen Gilles Seidel does the absolute best job at creating an alternate reality. She writes as if she has been a beauty queen, a professional ice dancer, a famous rock star.
I remember howling over a book that referred to the heroine preferring “the bright lights of Boise” and leaving for the big city. Boise at that time didn’t even have a shopping mall and it was as far from a big city as it was possible to get. Pretty clear that the author had never been to Idaho, but a good laugh is all I remember from that book.
It doesn’t bother me a bit unless it’s blatant. (The mountains, waterfall type stuff would drive me crazy)
I’ve heard several authors say they get mail telling them if they get it wrong.
I would try to get it as right as possible. Like you say, if Wal-Mart’s the coolest thing about your backyard, it’s not so easy to write what you know.
Great column!
It was detailed enough to tell she’d either been there or had done great research and yet vague enough that I couldn’t pick it apart.
Tara Marie – THANK YOU for this, LOL! I’ve never been to upstate New York and did a ton of research. I’m glad I got the flavor mostly right!
Er, I can get a heck of a lot of writerly milage out of Wal-Mart. Great people watching place.
This certainly varies by author, but…
I can usually tell if an author is out of their geographic comfort zone, even if I’ve never been to the place myself. Generally, if a writer spends a lot of time somewhere, he or she will develop opinions about the place. Opinions which subtley manifest in his/her writing. A tourist will perceive a city differently than a long-time resident.
The most annoying mistake I remember is from a television show, not a book. X-Files had an episode supposedly set in Roswell. It was campy and silly, but I thought they pushed it too far when they sprinkled saguaro cactuses on the landscape. Arizona has saguaros; not, New Mexico.
But I’ve never had any desire to write and complain to an author about inaccuracies.
I get annoyed when a book gets easily checked facts wrong. They toss me out of the story and I ask myself, is the story good enough to ignore this stuff or not? Usually I finish it. But sometimes–well, I’m a CA girl, born and raised in the SF Bay Area. And one author insisted on making a major plot point depend on the criminal who was being transported from one city to another escaping in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the snow. But, she started the cop/prisoner run in LA and the destination was Las Vegas. No one in their right mind would travel an extra 500 (approximately) miles north, then cut east, just to go over the Sierra Nevadas. Not when there’s a highway that goes directly from LA to Las Vegas. It goes through the desert, which has just as many opportunities to make an escape dramatic as the snow does. And if you want them stuck in snow, don’t set it in the summer, after the snow pack melts. That one was a wallbanger for me.
I’ve read a few books set in New Jersey, which is my home state, that got things wrong, but never anything that bothered me enough that I’d write to the author. Now I live in the Florida Keys, and I’ve set both my books here. I was realllly careful with my depictions, but I’m sure someone will approach me at a booksigning someday and tell me point out something. (I did catch an error during the edit phase of the upcoming release where I’d located the weather/spy blimp over the wrong Key. LOL) My biggest concern with the first book was that I’d set it at a dolphin facility. I work at a dolphin facility. Instead of wondering what my co-workers would think about the love scenes in the book, I lived in fear that I might have said something incorrect about dolphins — even though I was positive that I had alll the information accurate. To my delight, nobody’s brought anything to my attention, so I must have gotten everything right.
Tara Marie–In the 80’s, I actually read a romance where someone pumped his own gas in NJ. Took me right out of the story, but I finished the book. Thought about telling the author, but didn’t want her to feel badly. Mary Stella–I know what you mean. I wrote a book set in my backyard (since the early 80’s anyway), Louisiana, and the locals said good job, except it’s not red ant hills, it’s piles. (Or vice versa). I never heard of red ants until I moved down South, and the way I wrote it was the way I heard it here. So sometimes you can’t win either way.:smile:
Interesting blog.
Oh, I have a good one, but it’s a movie. I was watching “The Prince and Me” and the heroine took the hero home to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. Which, if I recall, is in November. Except all the trees on her family farm were fully fleshed out with leaves, not a hint of snow in sight, and they had tractor races for fun all while wearing their light-weight windbreaker jackets. Wisconsin gets pretty darned cold by mid October, and there certainly won’t be a single leaf left on non-evergreen trees at Thanksgiving.
My big beef is when writers set the story in Chicago (my backyard) and paint the city to be a terrifyingly scary place. Yes, there are parts of the city that one should avoid both day and night, and yes, as a woman it’s always safer to have a man walk you to your car or make sure you get safely into a cab (but this is true in *any* city). But unless the hero/heroine is looking for trouble and therefore in a bad part of town, the parts of the city where he or she would most likely be are bright and full of lots of people and cars and cabs and safe. Al Capone is dead, so he’s not likely to jump out and point a machine gun at you. And gangs don’t roam the Magnificent Mile looking for trouble – they have plenty of it in their own neighborhoods.
I’m reading a book at the moment where the deities one of the more important secondary characters is beseaching do not have capitals at the beginings of their names, and its driving me NUTS! However, I don’t know whether its the writer’s fault, or an editorial decision (it can’t be a mistake, because this is happening repeatedly), so I’m not inclined to want to contact the author, who otherwise seems capable of writing a decent enough Paranormal novel.
I’m attempting to set my hero’s backstory in Greece at the moment, which is turning out to be tricky, seeing as I’ve never been there and I essencially need a very personal view of the place.:shock: Thank heavens for highly detailed tourist guides with cut away images of streets, popular places, ect.
I am a little bit worried about comments from South African readers when my first paranormal (eventually!:wink:) comes out, because I set part of it in an area that I later discovered was slated for rapid development, and I’m sure by now the lay of the land will be very different. (I’ll just blame the eternal slog for representation and publication a new writer has to endure. Mwa ha!:cool:)
I can’t think of anything so glaring that I would be tempted to write the author about it. I chuckle at little things I notice and it may pull me out for a page or two, but that’s it. I’d have to say it bugs me more when I read inaccuracies about a person’s profession than setting, but still, I wouldn’t write. I like to write about how great the book is.
Who really has time to complain? That’s def. a ‘glass half empty’ kind of person. 
I had one reader write in about a problem with a book I wrote set in Dallas. I had the hero and the heroine climb up on the roof to watch the fireworks on July 4th. The vigiligent reader noted that in Texas it’s too hot to watch fireworks while sitting on the roof. So, I don’t know how we did it when I was a kid, but I definitely remember watching fireworks from the roof of our house. Maybe we had special zero-cool shingles? Don’t know.
To quote Mae West: You can’t please all the people all the time unless they’re men. (actually, she didn’t say that, I did, but I like to think she would have).
Worst I ever came upon was a book that absolutely hinged upon the hero not being able to get divorced – but he’d been married in the North of Ireland, not the South – so the entire will-he-marry-bigamously? plot made no sense. Lots of other minor mistakes also.
Did get very funny when one supposedly N. Irish character says to another that in order to pass unnoticed she should just greet passers by with some ludicrous phrase – I think it was “Top O’ the Morning to you!” [Just wave your shillelagh and burst into song, and you'll blend right in, begorrah!]
On the other hand, I bought a chick-littish book from a local author that I didn’t like partly because it was so insanely exact. Told you what roads the heroine drove down, what she saw there, what restaurants she ate in – all correct, but meaningless if you lived twenty miles away. It doesn’t set a scene to say ‘We drove up Railway Road’ if the reader doesn’t know the town.
Since I was born and raised in Alabama, spent the early part of my adulthood in Philly, lived in England for a year, and then moved to Seattle, I’ve got a lot of places I can be picky about if I choose to. And I often do. I try not to point fingers at specific authors, because someday I hoped to be published myself, and I want to store up some good karma for when I inevitably slip up on a detail despite all my best efforts to get it right. But if I’m thrown out of the fictional world by a missed detail, especially one I know could be easily researched, it’s hard for me to get my suspension of disbelief back. If the error is in the first chapter or two and I’m not all that invested in the characters yet, I usually don’t finish it. I have too many books and too little time as is, so I often take a glaring inaccuracy on p. 3 as a sign to move on.
I pounced an author in person to explain that there are no caves in the Florida Keys. We have been best friends ever since.
Lucky me – the drug smuggling industry is heating up in the Caribbean again and I may get to spend a month in Haiti and the Dominican Republic with my husband where book three in the Revenge Gifts series is set. I’ve only been to Dom Rep once. I need a wee tad more time there off the resort grounds to roam about aimlessly and catalog plants, weather and critters.
I would not attempt to write a book set in a location I had never seen first hand. I’m not that good — yet.
Explainer … ’cause if you don’t know me you might wonder. My husband is one of the “good guys” (depending on you point of view).
Yes. BTW. We’ve met some of the on our working vacations. Scan down to Aruba in January
I am constantly worried about getting facts wrong, so I double and triple check my information with people who know. But even though, you’ll have different opinions even if something seems to be “fact.” Since my first three books feature FBI related issues, I know I’ll have some errors, but I did my best to get the “big stuff” right, or to keep the information vague enough that people can extrapolate on their own.
Still, I’ve spoken to two people who either were or know FBI agents and have received two different opinions about a particular situation, so I’m going with what works for the book.
Regarding setting, my first book takes place in Malibu (predominately) and my husband knows the area very well. I took some liberties (the house my heroine is leasing doesn’t really exist, but it COULD); but when my husband was reading it, he told me I had my highways confused and I had the villain turning the wrong way on PCH to get to Malibu from the Santa Monica Freeway. I like rolled my eyes, but changed it — because those are the details that someone from LA would know.
My second book is set in Bozeman Montana where my hubby went to college (convenient, eh?) and he proofed it for accuracies. I had to change the location of one of my murders because he said where I’d described it wouldn’t work because there were no trees — so I moved the entire stalking ground of my killer about 30 miles south of where I originally had it.
But, I made up a canyon (it COULD exist geologically, but it doesn’t) where the show-down occurs and I took a few liberties, but the big things are all geographically accurate.
Still, I’m scared to death to do a book signing in Montana for fear I screwed something major up.
I once read a book by a certain author who, though classified as such, doesn’t!write!romance! and she got the date of the bombing of Pearl Harbor wrong. Not by a day or two, but by several weeks…
When I think about how many people had to have read that book (editor, copy editor, proofreader, etc) and let that mistake go because she was big name author, I just shake my head. That was pretty much a deal breaker for me, added to the fact that she has two plot lines and really does just fill in the blanks, and I stopped reading her stuff.
That’s why all my stuff is set in fictional towns
Yes, I’ve come across books set in my town or the major city right up the road. If I am able to set aside the reality of my location while reading these novels depends entirely on the author’s ability to drag me out of my ‘real life’ sufficiently and/or how blatant the errors are. I’ve never written letters about inconsistancies, but I’ve dropped an author or two who’ve just never quite gotten the location details correct.
To me, this depends on circumstances and the particular author. I would be much harder on a seasoned, economically empowered author, who could afford someone to check facts, than say, an author who struggling to pay a bill, and the kids in the family were the staff. I think you know what I mean.
Two authors, Nora Roberts and John Grisham made the mistakes of not checking the facts, and for a long time, I could not read them. Ms Roberts’ story was set in the Mississippi delta near Rosedale, in Bolivar County, and it had an antebellum home on the edge of the Mississippi River there. Plus, the amount of acres of land it took to support the family was also unbelievable. I finished the book, but I lost respect for the author for a long time. Because these are gross mistakes that any fact checker could have caught. And they were vital to the story and repeated over and over.
Grisham made one that surprised me and for a long time I whined about it. He had his two characters sitting in a car in downtown Greenville Mississippi, one county over from Roberts’ Bolivar County, and they could see the lights of the Mississippi Bridge. Huh? Duh? Not likely, not even Superman’s vision is this good.
I used to whine about both these all the time, and my husband, Fred, would laugh and say, “Well, you always told me the Mississippi Delta was like living in the Twilight Zone.”
No, I would not write an author about this. Just adding that. I also take a lot of trouble to do research myself, so I am critical.
If I wrote contemporary, I would definitely write something I knew about.
I’m a nitpicky person about grammar, setting, history, you name it. I’ve been mildly tempted a few times to write an author about certain glaring mistakes, but so far, I haven’t done it. It’s 50/50 whether or not I’ll finish a book that has a lot of goofy errors.
I don’t get really mad about those kinds of mistakes. One thing that did get me steamed, however, is when an author repeatedly used rohypnol (the date rape drug) as a plot device in an incredibly irresponsible way. Her story not only trivialized the effect that such drugs have on a person but also tried in a very twisted way to make them seem sexy. I’ve never written her a letter — I doubt I could do it without flaming her eyebrows off — but I will never read one of her books again. And I don’t recommend her to my friends, either.
I posted something on my own blog a week or so ago on “writing what you know” from a slightly different point of view — someone who didn’t even know the dates of the Regency period had posted on another web site wanting information on where to start researching her Regency romance (actually, her “medieval Regency romance”). But, I digress. Your question was what do they get wrong about where I live. Most common misconception is how people talk outside the Beltway, in central and southside Virginia. Many of us are transplants (I’m from California), and do not have southern accents. Those who do have speech patterns that are particular to where they grew up. Someone from the Bluefield area is not going to sound like someone from the Tidewater. Most authors have us sounding like we are from WEST Virginia! I realize that accents are hard to reproduce in writing, so I think the best bet is to minimize the so-called southern accent.
I lived most of my life in Southern California, and I think that the worst sterotype about where I was born and raised is that we are all Valley Girls! or that we are all familiar with Hollywood, or Beverly Hills, and the party, monied, hip movie crowd. I grew up near Pasadena, went to Hollywood on dates, but most of my leisure time was spent in the suburbs doing ordinary things.
I don’t tend to care as long as I find the story entertaining.
I have to admit. If someone portrays every member of my state as hicks or rednecks, I might take umbrage. Then again, I’ve seen those characters everyday. They exist. But to focus on one aspect and to ignore the rest is flat lazy.
I don’t need my story to be EXACT. I don’t want mile markers and all that jazz. Nope.
And the only way I would write an author and demand satisfaction is if it where a GLARING mistake.
I enjoying writing contemporary and paranormal. So much fun stuff to play with. And yes, I do tend to stick geographically with what I know.
Grins*
I’m a chuckler. And I may point out some glaring irregularity on my blog
but I can’t imagine ever writing to an author about a mistake.
I mean, there’s so many other people involved! Shouldn’t someone involved in the filming of The Prince & Me pointed out that in November it’s COLD in Wisconson (or at least commented about the unseasonally warm temps).
Having said that, my Nov. release is set and Seattle (where I used to live) and I know that I kind of glossed over things like where they were driving to and from, etc.
Read Isabel Sharpe’s newest Blaze in the Hush Hotel series this month. Great sense of place in NYC, including public transportation, rather than the Fake New York in which a lot of books seem to take place..
As a reader, I don’t care. it’s fiction. If I wanted hard facts, I would have gone and bought an encyclopaedia.
I absolutely would let the author know. It’s the Golden Rule AFAIC. If it were my book, I’d want to know so I didn’t make the same mistake again. Not telling the author would mean I wasn’t interested enough to ever read another of her (or his) books, and, sadly, this is most often the case.
Sure, there are lots of readers who’s comments are accompanied by a nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah. That goes with the territory. But wouldn’t you rather know you’d booboo’d than look like an idiot by doing it again in another book. That was a generic *you*, BTW.
I live in San Francisco, and I see so many books set in this area, written by people who not only have never been here but, apparently, are incapable of reading a map.
I can’t count the number of times someone drove half an hour from SF to Carmel for lunch. If you can do it in two hours, baby, you’re flying low and there is NO traffic. Likewise, people take an hour to get from Marin to SF, when it’s only a few miles. Even in horrendous commute traffic, I don’t think I’ve ever taken more than half an hour for that, and we’re talking hanging on Waldo Grade in first gear and park the whole way – maybe three miles???
It’s so common that I just ignore it, but maybe I shouldn’t. It bugs me that they would be so cavalier as to fail to do any research, especially about such a well-known area but, then, I probably would never read them again, anyway.:wink:
Sheesh, I thought we’d be a lot more forgiving of author geographic boo-boos since we’re writers ourselves. At least, I am. I don’t give a hoot about geographic inaccuracies, or about the fact that you can’t pump your own gas in NJ. If it advances the plot and it makes the story more exciting, bring on the fiction! It is fiction after all, isn’t it?
Well, the town I’m from is definitely not one to show up in fiction. As for the town I currently live in, the only book I ever found set there was “The Jane Austen Book Club” (yes, the author lives here, or so I hear), and for whatever strange reason, she never actually mentions the name of the town. I believe “River City” shows up as a reference once.
It amused me to be able to figure out the approximate location of one of the characters’s houses, though. Though I also was quite surprised when she mentioned the local rock-climbing gym, where one character falls off the wall because she didn’t bother to wait for her spotter to show up. Having climbed there myself (and I’m somehow doubting KF has?), I couldn’t help but think, “Um, last I checked they did NOT let you just climb up the wall without a spotter!” I’m surprised the owner(s?) have never complained about it publicly as giving them a bad rep. Maybe none of them read it?
Er… that should probably be “belayer”, not “spotter.” I’m so swift on terminology
When I read a book set in my home state (Montana), I tend to notice mistakes. For example, I once read a book that described the characters driving past “rolling wheat fields” in area which is actually far, far away from anything wheat. Usually mistakes like that pull me out of the story pretty quickly.
Allison B, if you ever do a book signing in Montana, I’ll try to make it–assuming, of course, that I see the announcement and that it’s somewhere near where I live, which is the western half of the state.
I had this happen reading a book about a closed adoption from the 60s set in Texas. I’m from Texas, adopted in a closed adoption and have been through every type of search experience there is (to my joy – since I found my birth mother.) Granted, this is a really, really focused type of “setting”, but since I knew it so well, reading something in a novel was SO off-based, the author lost that “credibity” for me. And the research wouldn’t have been hard, I don’t think, because of the TONS of sites out there that specifically target Texas adoptions and all the redtape it entails. However, I didn’t write her to tell her. I did finish the book. But the “this could really happen” aspect was shot.