Getting Facts Wrong

We’ve all read a book and run into an factual error that the author made.   John Gilstrap discusses this in You Can’t Stand on a Broken Leg (I met John a few years ago).

I think the story should come first, because sometimes factual isn’t interesting.  About eight years ago, I tried writing a book about my Desert Storm experiences.  I had this section where I described in great detail soldiers marching off to war.  It was accurate, but not exactly a page turner. 

But I also think that story doesn’t mean blowing off facts or not bothering to research them at all.  I read one book where the author did both.  The book was about a woman Vice President someone tries to kill.  Though it was billed as a thriller, the story was a romance novel with some action, and I could see how a publisher would have jumped on a romance with a woman Vice President.

• Problem #1:  The character was twenty-something.  Maybe the author decided to ignore the fact that there’s age requirement (35) for the sake of the story–but it made the author look sloppy.  Especially on top of the other two mistakes. 
• Problem #2:  None of the politicians acted like well, politicians.  Not hard to research.  Any newspaper on a daily basis would have done it.  I think I could have bypassed that one if the story had been pretty good. 
• Problem #3: The character had egregiously bad judgement.  The kind of bad judgement that would have made her unsuitable for being one step away from the Presidency.  The lack of research and not caring to kind of get it right made me put this author on my “Do not read” list. 

What deal breaking problems with facts have you seen in books?

Plot-Driven vs. Character-Driven

I’ve had a realization over the last few days.  I’ve always thought of myself as writing character-driven books, and I’ve realized that I’m actually plot-driven.  I think I confused characterization with character-driven, and they’re not the same thing.

Consider this from Tameri Guide for Writers on Plot-Driven:

A plot-driven story captivates readers or audiences through the excitement of events. The characters are important, but the action takes precedence.

That description fits the thriller genre perfectly, and certainly fits some urban fantasy.  Even a detective novel would be plot-driven because the readers are coming in to see the character solve the mystery. 

This is what Tameri had to say on Character-Driven:

Character-driven stories rely on interesting characters and their responses to situations. While the situations arise from the plot, readers or audiences remember the characters.

On one of my previous projects ( a thriller), the story was set during the Civil War.  A Federal army officer was off on his own agenda, but he had to stop a fellow junior officer named Babcock who knew too much.  Very briefly, I considered a scene where the major orders Babcock’s regiment to come after Babcock, using a lie the soldiers believe.  Babcock realizes that, and he’s caught in the position of knowing his men will kill him to follow orders or to kill his own men for following orders based on a lie.  That never got past the thought stage because it would have been a distraction in the action-based story.  Now I undertand why it didn’t fit.  Action in the story took precedence, and such a direction would have been a distraction for what I wanted to do overall with the story.

My Editing Process Part I

The topic came up on the Absolute Write message board about the process of editing.   Everyone pretty much had a top down approach–big stuff first.  Mine follows the same path, but it does vary, depending on the project.  I’ve also made some adjustments on it based on what I’ve learned.

From my last project, a historical thriller (this was written with a cowriter):

Phase One was the major editing of the story.  Almost 15K got lopped off as we realized that one whole section of seven chapters wasn’t necessary.  That meant we were 15K too short and had to go through each chapter, looking for places to add material.  Sometimes I’d find a chapter that ended near the bottom of a page and would spend several days trying to find additions to get it to pop over.  The problem, of course, was that the additions needed to be legitimate, not just padding.  Sometimes it was easy to get it to pop over, and sometimes I couldn’t make it happen.

I even found a chapter that I realized didn’t quite have a point to it.  I gave it one, and ended up adding several chapters to do that.

Phase Two ended up involving two separate parts.  The first part was a search and destroy for repetitions.  I literally went through the manuscript on the screen and hunted for them everywhere.  Just them.  I didn’t look for anything else. I think I learned a lot by doing it like this because I don’t do as many of them any more. 

The second part was an idiom search.  I went through the manuscript just looking for idioms.  Once I’d spot a potential idiom, I’d look it up in my idiom dictionary.  The dictionary gave me the date the idiom originated, and if it was outside the timeline of the story, it was either gone or replaced with something else.

Phase Three was proofreading and general clean up.  I hate proofreading, so I try to catch all the typos I can through any phase.

Next is what I’m doing on the current project.

The Distance in Omniscient Viewpoint

Several years ago, a writer in my critique group submitted a couple chapters from the thriller he was writing.  It was in omniscient viewpoint, and it was so distant, it was like it pushed me away.  I didn’t understand why until recently.

I just finished Black Magic Woman, which is an urban fantasy done in omniscient.  It didn’t push me away like the writer from critique group; but it was rather distant.

Why?  What makes it different from J. K. Rowlings, Clive Cussler, Vince Flynn, and other similar writers?

The omniscient narrator had personality. 

With Black Magic Woman, it felt to me like the narrator was reporting objectively on what was happening.  Factual yes, but it didn’t add anything to the personality of the story or the characters.   I kind of wish it had; the characters reminded a little of Mr. Steed and Mrs. Peel. 

Not sure about the critique group piece, though.  I wish I still had it so I could look at it again.  I’m guessing it was some combination of reporting objectively and word choice.

Why Urban Fantasy?

I’m currently working on an urban fantasy, with two other urban fantasies and a paranormal in the works.  But why did I choose urban fantasy?

I actually have had a hard time in the past figuring out exactly where my writing fit.   I spent years on a first novel, not really understanding what it was.  From research, it appeared to be a mystery, but it wasn’t a “whodunit.”  I’d look at the books in the mystery section of the bookstore and then look at the writing books and think, “But this isn’t like my book.”

It was a thriller, a genre which has only recently gotten more attention because of the efforts of International Thriller Writers.  I liked thriller because I liked action novels, particularly adventures and treasure hunts.   Not PG-13 action with violence, but just fun action.

I joined with a co-writer on my last project, and we wrote an action-adventure thriller.  But the market changed.  The books coming out were mainly crime novels, often very violent.  Every other book I read had someone’s eye being gouged out.  And in the books where that didn’t happen, a character’s finger got chopped off.

I didn’t want to go in that direction.

So when co-writer and I broke up, I had to rethink what I wanted to write.  The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing by agent Evan Marshall had a chapter on my situtation.

I started with the genres/categories I often read and made a list of the pros and cons of each one.  From that list, I started thinking about urban fantasy.  One of the big pros was that I could have some fun with magic, but I didn’t necessarily have to build an entire world around it.  I could use modern things like limousines, paparrazzi, celebrities, movies, and technology.

But when urban fantasy had come up before, I’d stayed away from it.  The majority of the books are about vampires and werewolves, and while I like reading good stories, I’m not drawn to writing about vampires and werewolves.

Then I thought: Why do I need to write about vampires or werewolves?  And I realized I’d had the idea for the story for some time.  So I’m taking what I was doing in thriller–treasure hunts and action-adventure–and putting it into an urban fantasy.