Where does fact meet fiction? (3 of 3)

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.