I read a lot. I love reading and I’m not especially picky when it comes to my reading. What I mean by that is if you list a town in New York and tell me details about that town I’m not going to check to see whether you were accurate in your description. I’m going to trust you know what you’re talking about or maybe give you an embellishment allowance—this is fiction after all.
I mostly tend to read contemporaries, whether it be suspense, para, chick lit or whatever. I don’t check the facts to see if a Beretta XYZ could really shoot like that or if Manolo’s really cost that amount of money. I do, however, wonder what happens to shifters clothes whenever they shift—seems like they’d need an extensive wardrobe—but that’s not even a big deal. I have a pretty big suspension of disbelief for certain things.
I don’t read a lot of historicals and one of the reasons is the “are you sure that was possible in that time period” question. I’m not a huge history buff, but I have a pretty good idea about certain things and when they are disregarded it does pull me out of the story. I hate being pulled out of a story.
And that’s the thing. The stuff that pulls me out of a story are often common editorial misses (and it happens so easily, there’s no blame here), but sometimes they are just common sense.
Editorial issue: the baby that belonged to one person in the first part of the story and half way through belong to another. Or someone’s name changed part way through the book. Or maybe their eyes or hair colour. Or sometimes it was a certain day and now it’s before then or days afterwards and we’re not given any ryhme or reason for the change.
Common sense: that sexual scene that has your character doing a 360 in a certain position without damaging anyone’s body parts. Don’t think so. Or perhaps a scene has been described as the weather being so hot you could fry an egg, yet someone is skipping rope barefoot. Maybe it’s only me, but I wonder how good that could feel. Or maybe the heroine is attending a rooftop party and having a great time, yet at the beginning of the story we were told she’s afraid of heights and there is no mention of her being worried or suddenly getting over it. Or a common one I see in romance: the lathing. Come on–get over the lathing already. A lathe is a machine that shapes wood, or sometimes other material. You do not want to be doing that to anyone’s body. Unless you’re writing a thriller.
Maybe no one else wonders about stuff like this. Maybe it’s only me.
The problem is if I start wondering about something, or flip back to see if I missed something, then I’ve been pulled out of the story. And it can take a lot of effort to figure out what’s going on. Some of the stories have still been enjoyable enough for me to shrug my shoulders and carry on. It’s actually quite rare for me to have a DNF, because I really do want to like what I’ve chosen to read. But, sometimes, I just can’t. And then I tend to not recommend that book. And I love recommending books.
I’m sure I’ve read tons of stories that have issues that I’ve never noticed because I was just so drawn in. The thing is you may have errors (and, seriously, it can be as simple as a nefarious typo that changes the intent of the words), but if you write the tightest, best damn book ever and use your common sense, then, likely, your reader won’t even notice.
No related posts.
Yep, I don’t care about typos either.
Give me some honest, true emotion and you’ve got me as a reader.
Unfortunately that’s tougher to do than ensuring words are spelled correctly.
Amen!
I’m gloriously unaware much of the time as long as the story has pulled me in, and yeah, like you, I don’t tend to go double-check details. But I agree that if I happen to know the author is wrong, it does kill the mood—depending on the size and severity of the mistake, either for a moment or permanently.
Luckily the one glaring error I noticed in yesterday’s book was one I could just laugh at and then ignore. A side character was described as having a Master’s in science from MIT. I looked up at my hubby (who graduated from MIT), read him that part, and watched him facepalm, literally. If that had been the main character, though, it would have been harder to ignore.
Since being published, I’ve become more forgiving of typos, since there are so many places where the author loses control of the manuscript.
But I just read a book where a character took sparkly barrettes out of the woman’s hair in her house, and they appeared under the cushions of his couch shortly thereafter.
Or the baby girl at the end of one book who was a boy in the beginning of the next.
Or the specifically named prescription medication that was yellow instead of blue.
If I know enough to notice something’s wrong, I’m likely to growl or go back to make sure I didn’t miss something.
I try to get the details right — sometimes, it’s simply advancing technology that makes things wrong.
How much the errors bug me depends on my emotional involvement in the story.
I try to overlook certain things, typos happen all the time and I’m not vain enough to think they’re not in my stories. I’m certainly not going to criticize others for a misspelled word or 2. When writing historicals, I try my best to keep all detail accurate, but sometimes it’s near impossible to figure the everyday life of certain times and places.
Still, the glaringly obvious ones do pull me out of a story and I usually can’t get back into it.
I don’t notice mistakes if I’m swept up in the story.
Having written research-intensive stories now, I realize how easy it is to lose track of details.
But, c’mon, people, a Romance novel set in the Middle Ages should not have a heroine with big, round boobs which stand up themselves (no bras) and no stretch marks, if she’s ever been pregnant.
Some things I simply cannot suspend my disbelief for.
Typos I can forgive but the wrong word completely? Proof readers still exist, right???
What really is at the top of my hate list is the wrong vocabulary. Bear with me. I’m a Scot and every so often will try one of those highlander books.
Wanna talk through against the wall? In contemporaries, the hero is alway a clan chief or some other type that is wealthy. They don’t talk in regional dialects. These are basically upper class guys who usuallly would have gone to schools with other aristocrats and even royals. These are guys who are supposed to have gone to University in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, or St. Andrews (all the uppers go to these schools) and they talk like your average Hamish on the street (and I’ve met very few men actually called Hamish or Angus). Yet, I’m asked to believe that they pepper their phrases with “dinnaes”, or they call guys “mate’, maybe if they are slumming but not with women who they are trying to get nekkid with.
The last one I read, was thrown against the wall at least twice.
I have a really good memory so I notice stuff like this to. Although it has to be really egregious to make me put the book down entirely. Usually it’s more like, Aw jeez. Is it so hard to proofread?
For example:
I was reading Sugar Daddy by Lisa Kleypas and I noticed an interesting plot inconsistency:
p. 33 “Having no children or grandchildren of her own, Miss Marva had decided to take me under her wing.”
p. 97 “for once [Miss Marva's] laugh was not a happy sound. I knew without asking that she was thinking of her own daughter, a woman named Marisol who lived in Dallas and never came to visit.”
Ooops.
How do they not catch something like that?
That drives me nuts. I’ve encountered such problems in several books lately and find it frustrating every time. In one book, the timeline suddenly seemed to break down and I ended up going back and plotting each day on a piece of paper to see what was bothering me. Hmm. Story started on a Tuesday… and then there were five additional weekdays before Saturday. *blink blink*
Kimber An: two kids, not a single stretch mark in sight. My mom had six, and she doesn’t have any, either. It’s rare, I know, but not an unheard of phenomenon…
Mmm. I’m pretty forgiving of mistakes in spelling that get by the proof reading, but there are things that pull me out of the story too. I grew up on a farm and often there are some glaring misconceptions about that life. When you’re in a barn filled with cows it doesn’t smell like fresh alfalfa. It smells like cow dung.
Oh, and if we’re keeping track, 4 kids here and no stretch marks. Not everyone gets those.
A factual error will annoy me more than a “wait, that house was a bungalow and now it’s got an attic?” type of error. Hell, we’ve all done that. I once had a house start a story in Finchley and magically move to Chiswick. But factual ones will do it every time and play on my mind until I just can’t read it any more.
Just yesterday I had to dump a book because the heroine thought the hero, an Arab man, looked like Lawrence of Arabia. Who of course, was a white, British man.
Now when reading an ordinary girl + Arab Sheikh story I don’t expect to go all that deeply into the history, culture and social issues of the Middle East. But if the author didn’t even get as far as one of the most famous movies ever set in that region when it comes to research, then I know that I won’t be able to take anything else in the book remotely seriously.
The book was already sort of boring anyway, so that gave me an excuse to toss it at the wall!
Wait… Peter O’Toole and his blue eyes can’t pass for an Arab???
“Just yesterday I had to dump a book because the heroine thought the hero, an Arab man, looked like Lawrence of Arabia. Who of course, was a white, British man.”
Ha! I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but that would’ve annoyed me, too for the same reason!
In reading everyone’s responses, I realized I CAN be more tolerating of certain things I hadn’t thought of this morning when I first posted. But I am a firm believer in a good outline for these descriptions/timelines. Not that I haven’t made them, and I did accidentally change a character’s name once in a short story (Raven to Rachel) but I know that and am deeply embarrassed by it. I have a reason (hospitalization, on really great pain meds afterwards, and my godchild’s name is Rachel and she was visiting me when I worked on that story) but it doesn’t help the reader.
Still, the Lawrece of Arabia thing cracked me up. AH, when Peter O’Toole was still handsome.
“Still, the Lawrece of Arabia thing cracked me up. AH, when Peter O’Toole was still handsome.”
Noel Coward said that O’Toole was so pretty in the role they could have called it ‘Florence of Arabia’.
I have a big problem with lathed being mistakenly used in novels too. Ouch. I also have an issue is the idea of being “laved” by someone’s tongue (which I hope is what the really author means), but that’s a different matter. Whenever I come across lathed in a perfectly good sex scene, it always snaps me right back to reality. Apparently bad editing is a horrible turn-off.
Haven’t run into it recently, but I know it’s lurking in one of the books in my to be read pile right now…
I’m collecting these in Diana Palmer books. I don’t think there’s been one by her yet where there wasn’t at least one thing that made me start sputtering “wha…? wha…?” My favorite so far is the woman who was born 7 months after her supposed father died, so as part of the pretense they claimed she was premature.
Wait, what? But why? If she was premie, it moves her date of conception closer to her ‘father’s’ date of death, and thus increases implausibility. *headscratching*
I can forgive the occasional typo, it can happen to anybody. But I have a very limited tolerance for ungrammatical / clumsy phrasing when it occurs outside of dialogue. I’ve also come across a few books with howlers of the, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means,” variety and they never fail to make me lose interest.
Exactly! My best guess is that Palmer was thinking of posthumous and wrote premature instead. But who knows, really. Her books are always chock full of WTF moments. Part of their charm.