No author
ever sets out to make a mistake, and no author ever writes a perfect book.
That’s the case with fiction and nonfiction books, both of which I’ve written.
A book is simply too big a project to be bug-free.
In a work
of nonfiction, many mistakes are indisputable. The author spells someone’s name
wrong or gets a date wrong. The author’s interpretations of the facts can also
be wrong, but these are subject to endless debate and need not concern us at
the moment.
The
question of accuracy in fiction similarly involves considerable ambiguity and
openness to interpretation. The author wants to get details right, obviously,
but if she has a certain type of pistol ejecting its shell casings when that
type of pistol in fact doesn’t, how important is the mistake? I’d argue (and
some would argue otherwise) that as long as she’s not writing a
forensic-investigation novel and plays fair with the reader about the clue of
the shell casings, it’s a pretty minor error.
The Intentional ‘Mistake’
Fiction
being fiction, authors are free to imagine things that don’t exist. Suppose a
mystery writer was setting a story in a clearly identified national park, using
many of its real elements as part of the tale. Then suppose said author gave
said park a fictitious old lodge that the real park doesn’t have, in order to
provide a place for suspects, victims and more ambiguous characters to mingle.
Would that be a mistake?
Of course
not. It’s fiction, and as long as the author acknowledges that it was done
intentionally for the sake of the story, where’s the harm? The important thing
in a piece of fiction is that the imaginary world is true to itself and in the
larger sense reflective of the real world in some way.
I got to
thinking along these lines last week, as I was working on my fourth mystery novel. I’ve gotten into the habit of showing the new book to Linda piece by
piece as I write it. She often catches typos and raises points about characters
and facts. It’s very helpful, really.
The Mistake That Wasn’t
Looking over
a recent passage, she came to a scene where I had one of the characters driving
a certain type of Subaru station wagon and promptly told me Subaru didn’t make
such a wagon. Trying to get it right, I had looked that up on Wikipedia
beforehand and found that they did make such a wagon in the early to mid 1990s,
and that since the story was set in 1997, the character could indeed have quite
plausibly been driving one.
And then I
got to thinking. Suppose I hadn’t looked it up, had been wrong about the model,
and the mistake had made it into the book. If someone had pointed out the
mistake to me, I would have been annoyed at having made it and made a note to
myself to be more careful the next time.
If, on the
other hand, someone had made the criticism that the character in question
didn’t seem to be the sort of person who would drive a Subaru, I’d have been
gobsmacked because I would stand accused of not being true within my fictional
world.
I raised
the point with Linda a couple of days later, and she got what I was saying. She
also reassured me on the point I considered important, saying of the character
in my book, “She’s definitely the sort of person who’d be driving a Subaru.”
We’re good.
