The problem is that an incorrect fact can throw your readers out of the story. I remember reading a Lawrence Block novel a while back in which a character returns to New York City on the Amtrak train the Lake Shore Limited. The train runs from Chicago to Albany via the Great Lakes, and then continues south to New York. Now, in the book, the train pulled into Grand Central Terminal, which might have confused some readers because all Amtrak trains pull into Penn Station. Well, Block must have known that there was a time when all the Amtrak trains that were not part of the northeast corridor pulled into Grand Central Terminal. And I knew this too, because I took the Lake Shore Limited in 1989, when I returned from a summer job at Los Alamos National Laboratory. But by the time the book was published, Amtrak had rerouted all their trains to pull into Penn, and I knew this because I love trains and had kept up with the routing changes. So by relying on memory instead of doing one extra piece of research, Block got a detail wrong. This one little discrepancy briefly threw me out of the “reality” of the story, and I had to struggle a bit to return to the flow.

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…

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.