How much is too much?
So, I was having a writing conversation last night with someone in Critical Mass, and I realized my mouth was about to say “be a lazy writer”. That wasn’t exactly what I meant, but let me outline the situation. I’d be interested to get other writer’s input. Years ago I wrote and completed a WWII thriller. It took a lot of research, but eventually I decided that me obsessing about the exact placement of furniture in one of the guest houses at Auschwitz was making me crazy. I decided to do some mighty hand waving, and try to keep the focus on the characters and their conversation, and just skate past the other stuff.
My feeling is that if you really, really set the mood and evoke the feel of an era in the first part of a book you can slack off a little in the later sections. You’ve established your “cred” with the readers, and (hopefully) you have them so invested in the characters and the story that you don’t need to sell every little detail. You don’t have to be Ian Fleming where you can give the brand of every fancy lighter, or kind of brandy. Of course Fleming had it easy. He was writing about his own era. It’s tougher when we’re removed by a number of decades, or centuries.
What is our obligation as writers to be absolutely true to the historical period? Some of this laziness may come from the fact that I’m also a Hollywood writer, and we’re the kings and queens of “ah, close enough”. I guess I’m so eager to write the book, and see how the characters are going to behave, and where they’re going to end up that I start to resent the really detailed research.
Thoughts? Advice?
Melinda
March 16th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
I believe there is a certain obligation to get correct the facts that, if not gotten right, could throw the reader or viewer out of the illusion of the story’s reality. I’ve actually touched on this tangentially in two posts of mine, at Reader Identification and Robert’s Rules of Writing #20: Know the Territory. But more specific to your point, I related an experience I had when reading a book, in Robert’s Rules of Writing #19: Get Right, or Get Close:
So on the one hand, I feel it’s important to get the facts right.
On the other hand, I feel that bending facts to fit the story can work, as long as you’re somewhat honest about it.
Let me present an example that came to mind since you mentioned Auschwitz. A few years ago, I published a story (”Kaddish for the Last Survivor”) in which it was necessary to give the number of the tattoo on a Holocaust survivor’s arm. I picked a number I wanted to use for specific reasons, but then I did the research on the number and found out exactly where in Europe that particular survivor would have come from. So, in the end, I did in fact appropriate the number given to a real inmate at Auschwitz, but I made sure that my fictional character with that number came from the right place.
In some ways, this question also depends on what kind of reader you hope to appeal to with your story. If you want to reach readers steeped in WW II lore, or who lived through the time, you had better get more right than if you’re just hoping to reach folks with a more casual interest.
Hope I didn’t go on for too long…
March 17th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Melinda –
I always emphasize the importance of researching to my students — if only because getting wrong a fact that is relatively common knowledge can send a lot of readers flying out of the book. Once a reader finds that the author has ‘lied’ to them, they don’t believe anything else the author says.
But… none of us are ever going to fool an expert. No matter how much research I do into 17th Century France, I’m never going to be able to get the time frame so ‘right’ that a historian of the period isn’t going to be able to find ‘mistakes.’
I feel my job as a writer is to get it ‘close enough.’ I need to be able to convince the ‘normal’ reader for the story I’m writing that I know the setting. I have to evoke the “look-and-feel” of the time and period, but I don’t have to have every last detail right.