Fact Check!
Years ago, I read an otherwise okay book wherein Harvard University was described as being in Harvard, Massachusetts. When in fact Harvard University is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Trust me, I should know. There is, indeed, a Harvard, Massachusetts–and it’s home to a really great pick your own farm (that jars and sells its own really great applesauce) and nothing else. Whereas Cambridge is home to Bartley’s Burger Cottage. A wonderful place that almost single-handedly fed me for some years.
But the problem is hardly limited to the realm of self publishing. In one of Ann Rule’s books, the Provo Temple is incorrectly identified as the Salt Lake Temple. Being a) from Utah and b) a Mormon, I immediately noticed this difference! Stephen King, too, has made a number of mistakes in regards to describing both Mormons and their beliefs.
And the thing is, that matters. Not because his ignorance is offending all the Mormons out there but because what you describe–and how accurately you describe it–influences the course of your book. Whether you’re having your action take place in a pee-smelling concrete jungle with great burgers or an apple orchard matters. Whether you understand the religious beliefs of either the real life people you’re trying to profile or the fictional characters you’re trying to create matters. Because it all boils down to this question: how real do you want your world to be?
One of the criticisms I’ve gotten for The Demon of Darkling Reach is that it contains too much modern language. In fact, phrases like “fuck you” date back to Republican Rome. The Latin slang, which translates to “fuck” actually derives from the word fornix, which means arch; people used to get together for sexy time underneath the aqueduct arches in Rome. Moreover, nobody was actually speaking English in England’s middle ages; the modern language, with which we’re all familiar, hadn’t been born yet. People didn’t go around sounding like Cecil B. De Mille movies; all that “thee” and “thou” in the King James Bible (which came out substantially after the middle ages ended) is due to the fact that the progressive tense hadn’t been introduced to English yet.
And this is where fact checking–and research as a whole–gets interesting: often the actual facts don’t comport with our expectations, or assumptions, at all. Which is, of course, why people don’t research in the first place; they assume. Which is how we end up with people taking classes in apple orchards and shouting “away, scoundrel!” rather than doing anything reflective of what might actually be, or have been, reality.
Do your homework!
