Michael W. Sherer
For
God’s Sake, Get It Right!
NOTE TO MY READERS: If you would like to hear this Guest Post read by its author, it can be found HERE (Mike's segment starts at minute 26 more or less).
Some of the worst writing advice you can get is to write what you know. It’s a huge fallacy, a myth. If we all wrote what we know, the world would be filled with boring, poorly written autobiographies. We wouldn’t have fantasy, science fiction, thrillers, regency romances… the list goes on. Did Mary Shelley reanimate a patchwork corpse and dictate her notes on the experiment? Did Poe dismember a body and hide it under his floorboards just to see if his guilt would cause him to hear a beating heart? Did Jules Verne captain a submarine or pilot a balloon? Most of us write about circumstances we’ve never personally experienced.
Some of the worst writing advice you can get is to write what you know. It’s a huge fallacy, a myth. If we all wrote what we know, the world would be filled with boring, poorly written autobiographies. We wouldn’t have fantasy, science fiction, thrillers, regency romances… the list goes on. Did Mary Shelley reanimate a patchwork corpse and dictate her notes on the experiment? Did Poe dismember a body and hide it under his floorboards just to see if his guilt would cause him to hear a beating heart? Did Jules Verne captain a submarine or pilot a balloon? Most of us write about circumstances we’ve never personally experienced.
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Another homily you shouldn’t believe:
“Don’t sweat the small stuff; and it’s all small stuff.” Self-publishing has
opened up a world of opportunity for authors. When my first novel was published
25 years ago, about 44,000 books were published annually in the U.S. The number
last year had grown to nearly 14 times that many. And, according to Bowker,
235,000 of those were self-published. Writers who never would have seen their
books in print five years ago now can sell thousands, even millions, of copies
of their work. But, just as some of the books traditional publishers put out
are crap, so are many self-published books, perhaps a much larger percentage.
E-books have made self-publishing a no- or
low-cost affair, and the tools available online make the process as easy as a
few clicks of the mouse on a computer. Those two factors alone have encouraged
a huge number of authors to self-publish who would otherwise endure slush piles
and stacks of rejections from agents and publishers. And, yes, it’s encouraged
every wannabe author to put his or her efforts out there for the world to see. Many
aren’t ready for primetime. Some will never be ready. A majority, however, are
what traditional publishers call “midlist” authors whose work is certainly good
enough for publication, but may never find a wide audience.
Sadly, the product many of these authors
put out isn’t worth reading for one simple reason: lack of good editing. Maybe
they’re too eager to get their work “out there,” and don’t take the time to
make their books the best they can be. Maybe they can’t afford a good editor.
Or perhaps they’re too lazy to proof their own work. In so doing, they violate
their sacred trust with readers.
As fiction authors, in particular crime
fiction, we forge an unspoken, unwritten contract with readers. We promise to
do our very best to entertain them, to give them characters who are lifelike
despite prowess at one skill or another beyond our normal ken; to offer
settings that may be both exotic and foreign, yet places we might find on a
map; to carry us on a thrill ride with twists and turns, steep climbs and
dramatic drops that leave our stomachs in our mouths but never jar us so hard
we’re thrown off.
In short, we promise not to stretch
credulity, not to give them a reason to suspend disbelief. Which means that we
have to get it right. We must do our research and speak as if we’re experts on
every topic even if we’re not. Because the unfortunate truth is that if we get
details wrong, then we’ve quickly lost a reader’s trust. Once and they might
forgive us. Twice in one book and they might reconsider finishing what we’ve written.
More than that, and we’ve likely lost a buyer and potential fan of our next
book.
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Some of us hated doing homework in school,
and are loathe to fact-check absolutely every detail. And no one’s perfect,
which is why so many authors, including me, often say on an acknowledgements
page that they’ve done their best, but mistakes happen. We hate it when they
do. There’s nothing worse than being called out by an irate reader on a detail
that you overlooked, a detail you know you should have gotten right.
When I suggested earlier that you should
ignore the advice to write about what you know and use your imagination to
create worlds with which you’re unfamiliar, I didn’t mean you shouldn’t learn
how those worlds work. Don’t know the difference between a revolver and a
semi-automatic pistol (a mistake I still
see often in crime fiction)? You’d better find out before you put a weapon in
the hands of your character.
I recently read a book in which the author
made, for me, four fatal errors that demonstrated a lack of research, lack of a
good copy editor or both. The first was misspelling the name of a major defense
contractor. The error easily could have been remedied by a quick look on the
Internet. It wasn’t a horrible mistake, but it wasn’t a typo either, which
suggested sloppy work.
The second error was the protagonist’s
disappointment that DNA results hadn’t come back from the lab within 48 hours
(the protagonist being a crime scene investigator). The CSI technicians I’ve
spoken with all say they’re lucky to get results back in as little as two to
three weeks. The mistake made me think that the author had relied on a
perception propagated by television shows and not real research.
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The author committed a third error when a
pathologist conducting an autopsy definitively declared that the victim’s
killer had used a revolver with a silencer. Suppressors are rarely used on
revolvers because they offer little benefit; the gap between the cylinder and
barrel permits too much sound to escape. And though I haven’t yet asked an
expert, I find it hard to believe the wound itself would reveal whether a
silencer had been used or not.
Then, in the denouement, the struggle
between protagonist and serial killer at the scene of a light plane crash, the
author kept referring to the still-rotating rudder. At one point, the hero
shoves the killer into the “rudder” while it was turning, causing it to bruise
his shoulder but not incapacitate him. I think the author meant “propeller” not
“rudder,” but by that point my credulity had been frayed to the breaking point.
The book wasn’t badly written, but mistakes
like these scream “Amateur!” Worse, for me, they make me leery of reading
authors I’ve not heard of, or authors whose books have not been vetted by a
large numbers of readers. And I end up approaching the next few books I read
with a jaundiced eye and more unforgiving of even the smallest of errors. To be
fair, I find errors like these in traditionally published books by best-selling
authors, which is an even more egregious crime.
Self-publishing is giving a tremendous
number of authors a chance to find readers they wouldn’t otherwise. Don’t lose
those readers right off the bat with errors and sloppy editing. Get it right!
BIO:
After stints as manual laborer, dishwasher,
bartender, restaurant manager, commercial photographer, magazine editor and
public relations executive, Michael W. Sherer decided life should imitate art
and became an author and freelance writer. Mike is the Thriller
Award-nominated, best-selling author of Night
Blind, the first in the Seattle-based Blake Sanders thriller series. His
other books include six novels in the award-winning Emerson Ward mystery
series, the stand-alone suspense novel Island
Life, and the Tess Barrett YA thriller series.
Please visit him at http://www.michaelwsherer.com or you
can find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/thrillerauthor
and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/MysteryNovelist.
Thanks for the great post, Mike. I confess that you have hit the nail on the head with one of my own pet-peeves. Researching stuff is hard work, granted, but it can also be great fun!
Eric @ www.ericjgates.com
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