What should a fiction writer sacrifice for factual accuracy?

Hurricane Andrew was the focus of the discussion that started this three-part saga. In writing about Andrew, I relied on memory and research both. Both memory and research, though, are sometimes faulty. Whether I was wrong about being in the eye of Andrew or not (I still don’t quite know — I think it depends on whether the house in the novel is north or south of the Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, which is a difference of blocks, and which wasn’t noted in the novel), I would say that this was not, ultimately, one of my writing sins, since the eye did pass over the area at large.

But it’s a good example of a writing sin of another kind — the sin of including something that tears a reader out of the story and sets him to scratching his head instead of continuing to the next page. We don’t want that, and we should do what we can to avoid it.

Recently I read a review of a novel that featured some sort of weaponry — I don’t recall what type, and I didn’t notice when reading the book that the weaponry, according to the reviewer, would never have been used in the situation of the novel. That author lost the fraction of readers who actually know about that stuff, maybe. Maybe the loss, in this case, wasn’t terribly huge — but I bet if someone had brought the inaccuracy about the weaponry to the author’s attention during the revision process, she would have changed it immediately.

It’s not that writers don’t care about detailed accuracy — it’s that our knowledge is limited. We research, yes, but often we don’t even realize what we should double-check. We skim over a sentence and find it absent of flags, and we move on.

However, I think most writers would admit that they would, in some select instances, after giving it a good amount of thought, sacrifice a few intimately knowledgable readers for the many who don’t quite know the world as fully, and might be less inclined to notice a wayward detail. It’s a contradiction, because in most ways the readers who know your world intimately are the ones writers crave and appreciate the most, as if they are reading your work on several levels. But, still.

For example: I had doctors read my book to check the medical stuff. One of them said to me, “This wouldn’t happen, medically, but most people wouldn’t know that. And I think you should leave it in, because it’s beautiful.”

After some thought, I ended up writing around it (which means I did a little writing to acknowledge the problem on the page), but I left it in. I’m not saying it was the right thing to do, but that’s what I did. Because ultimately I agreed with the doctor friend — it was beautiful, and it was true to my characters and their relationship.

Do I cringe when I think of the readers who will be jarred by the details I got wrong, intentionally or unintentionally? Yes. Take the above not as an excuse, but as an open apology, and a promise that, if I may boldly speak for others, writers don’t mean to make these kinds of mistakes, and we will continue to try our best not to.

Using true-life settings in made-up books. With examples and a quiz!

(The post arose from a brief discussion on my Amazon Author page and started with an earlier post about the thinly veiled autobiography myth.)

In some novels,  what comes from the author’s experience is not character or plot, but setting. This might seem obvious, but a lot of writers depend much more heavily on the places they’ve been than on replicating the circumstances of their lives. The schools and homes and roller skating rinks and ice cream parlors and boat marinas and city halls of their experiences are, often, the landmarks of their novels.

Which begs the question that I think confronts every writer at one point or another: How close to the facts should fiction stick?

I’m not talking about historical novels, which it goes without saying should be pretty darn close, or even re-imagined historical novels (I’m thinking of Ian McEwan’s excellent ATONEMENT, which is an imagined story deeply entwined with an historical event). I’m talking about novels that are not heavily reliant on historical events, but happen against a true-life backdrop.

I’m talking about being true to setting, which includes place and period.

Here’s an example. (This is not an example from my writing.)

Let’s say your novel is set in Florida City, Florida, in 1999. Your main characters, two brothers, live in a duplex on Thelma Terrace, and in their backyard is a hammock that swings between black walnut trees, and there’s an easement on the property that cuts through the backyard of a gas station that’s been closed for years, and at the far end of that lot there’s a creek where the characters sometimes wade on hot days. And let’s say they wade in this creek, together, on July 4th of that year.

Next, a quiz! There are no wrong answers.

Now let’s say you have a reader who lives in Florida City, and has lived there all her life. She knows Thelma Terrace. It’s a one-block residential street lined with banyans — but there are no duplexes on Thelma.

Is this changed detail a fact-and-fiction sin? Was it a mistake to include it?

Now, let’s back up. Let’s say there ARE duplexes on Thelma — the block is full of them, actually, but there are no black walnut trees there. In fact, there are no black walnut trees in Florida City. In fact, there are no black walnut trees in all of South Florida!

Is this detail a fact-and-fiction sin?

Now let’s say you’ve changed black walnut trees to mangrove trees, so you’re safe there. But let’s say there’s no gas station, open or closed, in the Thelma Terrace neighborhood, though there is a tackle shop. And there’s no creek — although there is one a few miles inland.

Do these inaccuracies rise to the level of writing sin?

Finally, let’s say that on July 4, 1999, there was a major event that affected pretty much everyone in Florida City — say, a storm during which several people were killed by fallen lines and the whole city lost power — only you didn’t include it in your novel at all, even though the novel covers that period, and Florida City is not very big.

Sin?

So let’s air our answers to the above hypotheticals. Is it a “writing sin” to put your characters in a duplex on a real-life street, if in real life there are no duplexes on that street?

No, I don’t think this rises to the level of sin. I think it’s a good idea to use a real street name if you’re writing about a real place, since presumably you’ve chosen to write about a real place for a reason. I think it’s a good idea to choose a street that suits your characters and their demographics. But sometimes real street names stink, or sometimes they’re perfectly named but in the wrong part of town. I don’t think you should move around real streets, geographically, in fiction, but I do think you can fudge a bit regarding what sits on that street. Maybe don’t put a shopping mall in the middle of an historic neighborhood, but otherwise I think it’s OK.

How about the black walnut tree?

Yes, this is a sin, in my opinion. The first example is a writer embellishing on reality, but staying basically true to the spirit of the real place. The second is just an easily avoided error. (As one might guess, there’s a lot of flora in STILTSVILLE, and I had readers with much greener thumbs than mine look for inaccuracies. But I wouldn’t bet my life that there are no flora-related mistakes in the novel. And those would be examples of errors, not license.)

Next example — I think it’s OK to add an invented gas station and a creek to Thelma Terrace, as long as they are, as I mentioned, true to the spirit of the location.

NOTE: I definitely know at least one writer who would disagree with me on this. She would say that if you’re going to use a real street, you shouldn’t futz with the buildings or anything else. Because — and I’ll elaborate on this in tomorrow’s post — it will interrupt the reading experience for anyone who knows the true-life neighborhood.

Now, we come to the exclusion of an important local event from the narrative — July 4, 1999, in the fictional world of this example, does not include a storm and fatalities from a downed power line and a blackout. (Why not? This seems like a great setting for fiction! But that’s beside the point.)

Let’s assume there’s some other reason organic to your novel that requires the plot to be set on July 4, 1999. So you can’t simply move the date of the story to another month or year. If this is true, then that means that your novel is tied to history, at least at some other point in its narrative. I don’t think you can reasonably ignore a big event that occurred at the same time. I think you can write through it, make it incidental instead of the focus, but I don’t think you can ignore it entirely.

More often, though, it’s not a matter of excluding events, but of including them. When I wrote the first draft of STILTSVILLE, I had an idea of which historical events I wanted to include — the Mariel boatlift, the Dadeland shootings, the McDuffie riots, Cristo’s Pink Islands, the Gainesville murders — but the novel covers three decades. I’m sure I didn’t mention everything that affected people’s lives during that period. Did I miss any really big event during that time period? I hope not, but at the same time, my focus was on the events that mattered most to my characters.

But I also had in mind the personal lives of my characters, which proceeded independently of certain historical events. Maybe if I were a more organized writer — I’ve heard some writers even use outlines! What a revelation! — I wouldn’t have had the problem of matching the characters’ lives to the history of the city. But I did have that problem, and I had to intentionally include some timeline inaccuracies as a result. I wrote an Author’s Note to try to explain these inaccuracies that I believed needed to stay in the story, in service of the whole. Fallen soldiers, as I think of them.

TOMORROW: What should a fiction writer sacrifice for factual accuracy?

The idea for this post arose from a brief discussion on my Amazon Author page in which a gentleman who read an excerpt of STILTSVILLE in One Story magazine left a comment noting that although he liked the excerpt, he thought a detail about the hurricane described might be inaccurate. Another reader brought some more info to the table, and then I chimed in with my own mea culpa. I really appreciate these readers who cared enough to post messages, and they touch on a larger discussion about factual accuracy in fiction writing, and where writers draw the line.

A lot of historical events happened in the three decades covered in STILTSVILLE, all of which anyone living in Florida during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s will remember, and many of which are at least mentioned (if not described in detail) in the book. Did I get every detail right? Definitely not. Did I prioritize my fictional world over the real one? I don’t believe so, and I hope not. But it’s not as simple as it seems at first glance.

More on this later. The discussion thread got me thinking about how writers weave fact and fiction, which got me thinking about myths about writers and writing. This whole line of thought snowballed, and has resulted in a post that I’ve chopped into three sections:

1. The Mad Alcoholic Writer myth and the Thinly Veiled Autobiography myth

2. Using true-life settings in made-up books. With examples and a quiz!

3. How close to place and period detail should a writer stick?

Although most writers live domestic (read: not terribly interesting) daily lives and keep regular schedules and drink in moderation and exercise regularly and so on, there is still an ideation out there, in the American mythos, that writers are typing madly into the wee hours with a tumbler of single malt Scotch beside their keyboards. This archteypal writer is great at parties, tells stories about his benders in which celebrities and circus animals play starring roles, crashes on your couch with his shoes on, cheats on his wife and in poker. He is critically revered and is considered one of the great minds of his generation.

This is all OK with me. That mad alcoholic writer is far more interesting than I am, and he definitely exists (just not as commonly as we all might want to believe). Whether many writers have a dark little room inside their hearts where their inner, tamed, mad alcoholic lives is a subject for another post.

I loved this Paper Cuts interview with Lauren Groff, in which she describes a typical writing day, which includes “waking up to a screaming toddler,” then going out to her “wee little space that my husband carved out of the back of our garage. We call it a studio, but that’s being kind.” Now, that’s a writing day I recognize!

Another literary myth is that novelists are writing, at the character and plot level, about themselves. Of course, I understand the misapprehension. I mean, I tell people I’m writing about a family living in South Florida in the 1980s and 90s — what are they supposed to think?

Writers are often gently accused of creating characters who are thinly veiled versions of themselves, and plots that are thinly veiled personal experiences. Sometimes writers claim it, proudly — after all, what’s so wrong about that? — and sometimes they break down what’s true and what isn’t in their novels, and sometimes they just say that the novel is fiction, and that’s all there is to it. Sometimes they are taken at their word; more often, they are not.

I have a friend who wrote a scene in which her teenaged main character gets into a shouting match with her much-older sister — and the author’s own sister called her after the book came out, asking “Did I really say those terrible things to you?”

By this time, my friend had a little practice answering this kind of question. “No,” she said. “It’s fiction. I made it up. But I’m glad you thought the scene seemed true to life.” And she was being truthful — the scene was fiction, wholly and completely, and so were the characters. But she was glad her sister was so absorbed by the writing as to believe it might have actually happened in real life. She said she didn’t think her sister believed her.

The thing is, I don’t write about my family. I don’t know how. If I were to try to write a novel about my father and my mother and their complicated relationship to each other and my complicated relationship to them — I would fail. Horrifically. (I might fail in writing fiction, too, but not quite as blindingly.) I would feel disloyal, inhibited, whiny, and probably even dishonest. I love my characters, but they aren’t me/my mother/my father/my husband/my in-laws/my friends.

This isn’t to say I wouldn’t toss in a detail or two from my own experience (my family really did jump off the stilt house porch, for example, and throw water balloons at sailboats), but in the context of different characters, the original implications and meaning of the detail are lost. Rather, the detail absorbs the implications of its new context, and takes on a different meaning altogether.

TOMORROW: Using true-life settings in made-up books. With examples and a quiz!

I knew that Harper was running low on galleys of STILTSVILLE, but last week I received a second request from a blogger for the book — she’s from Florida and had a particular interest, so I wanted her to have one, whether or not she chose to review it. Unfortunately, I think I kind of promised one without realizing that by this point not only was Harper running low — they were out.

I own three personal copies of the galley. One is riddled with my own marks, which I made when it arrived even though I would not get another pass at the manuscript — so that one’s trashed. Another is loaned out. A third sits on a bookshelf in my living room, where I’d like it to stay. And my father’s been asking for one, so I’d like to oblige.

Coincidentally, at about the same time that I realized I needed just one more copy of the galley, I also received word that one was for sale on eBay. Rescued!

I purchased it for $9.95 plus the cost of shipping. (I should say that I realize there are some ethical issues with buying galleys in the first place, and I apologize to the kharma keepers for my bad behavior.)

I sent a note to the seller saying that I hoped what I was doing wasn’t weird, buying my own book and all, but thanks. The seller responded with this message:

“Hello — you are not the first one to purchase your own — Tony Bennett bought one of his own LPs from me for instance — I also had a witch who put out an LP in the 60s about how to seduce men in a witchly fashion buy her own LP – said her house burned down and lost everything – so it’s hardly weird — Thanks, XX”

It was kind of the guy to reassure me, and I really am grateful that I found it.

But then I started thinking about my little book and its little future. I want everyone I know, everyone I’ve ever met, to read this book. I mean everyone. Not because to make it a bestseller, but because I worked a long time on it and I think it’s kind of neat — not perfect, not brilliant, but pretty OK, with some above average parts — and I’d like everyone to share that. (And if they want to blog their review, great!)

Contractually, I’ll receive 25 copies of my hardcover. Considering the length of my acknowledgements, these will be out the door as soon as they arrive (save the one for prominent display on my bookshelf, of course).

So how realistic is it to think that the galley off eBay is the last time I’m going to buy my own book? Probably not realistic at all.

–Sd

In graduate school, when I knew nothing about publishing and very little about writing (now I know a little about publishing, a bit more about writing), I found myself the designated dog-sitter for a visiting writer, whose latest novel was months from being published in hardcover.

On top of the television in the writer’s rented home was the jacket cover of her newest book, wrapped around some other hardcover. When it arrived, she’d been surprised by it, and she wasn’t quite sure yet if she liked it or not. She’d been told by her editor to prop it up in her home, and try to get used to it.

That a writer of her regard didn’t have a say in her own cover surprised me. But then again, she wasn’t a designer — which is what she explained. She trusted her editor and the talented people in the design department at her publisher.

The story behind STILTSVILLE’s jacket art — which I love, and which is perfect for the novel — is this: someone in Harper’s design department was acquainted with photographer named Jason Fulford, who shot a series of Stiltsville in 1998 for LIFE magazine. Jason was kind enough to send Harper his photographs, and they chose one to be the cover of my novel.

The contracts that were signed between Harper and Jason are, needless to say, not my business. Neither is the choice of the cover art — I have, contractually, the right to be heard on the subject, but not the right to decide one way or another.

Michele Young-Stone, author of the new and much-adored HANDBOOK FOR LIGHNING STRIKE SURVIVORS, wrote recently in a guest post for Barnes & Noble’s Unabashedly Bookish blog about the travails of her own novel’s jacket design. This is a great read, and informative. There were no similar dramatic twists in STILTSVILLE’s design history.

As I’ve mentioned, one of the things I found most compelling about this photo is its sense of quietude. (Though I should say that quiet is a word I still flinch at in connection with my book, after its prominence in rejections by editors and agents, and its frequent use as a euphemism about character-driven novels, my own included. Still, it’s the right word when describing the cover photo.)

The other thing I like about the photo is that the day isn’t sunny, the sky isn’t blue. It’s an eggshell-sky day, of which there are many in South Florida, believe it or not. And of course there are many of these days in the lives of my characters, figuratively speaking.

However, just this past week I received a new .pdf of the jacket from my editor, who said they’d received some feedback that the cover was a little bleak, and needed punching up. So this is what they did — they punched it up. I had to put the covers side-by-side to see the difference, but then I could tell that the color of the new version is, well, a little punchier.

Which I think was the right decision, though briefly I wondered — this is giving the whole thing too much thought, I realize — if the new version might be misleading. But, ultimately, the novel is not bleak. (Side note — my husband recently finished THE ROAD, and was so shaken by it that he woke up our toddler to give him a hug — now that’s a bleak book!) But the truth is that STILTSVILLE is sad. And it’s a lot of other things, including (I hope) funny and sweet and, at times, smart.

So my cover found itself early and had only one slight change; could have been much worse.

–Sd