Building Trust in the Reader (And How Not To Do It)

[Dana King]

(Also posted on One Bite at a Time.)

I’m not a nit-picker when I read. I don’t care if there’s not really a door that opens directly onto Penn Avenue from Heinz Hall. Minor mistakes or changes can be lived with, so long as they don’t mess with historical facts (Germany can’t win the war, unless that’s the premise of the book), the author doesn’t get too specific (if you need a gun to have a safety, don’t specify it’s a Glock), or a key plot point hinges on it (don’t coerce a confession out of a guy by threatening the death penalty for marijuana possession.)

Still, some mistakes rankle so much you have to doubt what else the author got wrong, and where the hell those persnickety copy editors went to. I recently read a book (which shall remain nameless) where two such incidents came so close together I had to doubt the research and accuracy of some historical facts that were key to the story.

The hero has driven a couple of hours out of town as part of the investigation. There he sees the man who’s been following/threatening/bribing him for most of the book. The bad guy takes off; the good guy follows. The chapter ends with the hero driving sixty miles-per-hour down a country road, ostensibly in hot pursuit.

The next chapter opens with the hero stopping half way back to town to call his pregnant wife from a pay phone. (The story takes place pre-cell phone.) The bad guy is already there, posing as a cop to menace her. The hero hot foots it home where, of course, the bad guy gets the drop on him.

Additional menacing and threatening ensue. Finally pregnant wife gets permission to go to the bathroom, so long as she leaves the door open so the bad guy can hear what she’s up to. While he’s putting The Fear of God into the hero, wife comes out with the family shotgun.

So far, so good. (Well, maybe not, but not wholly inaccurate.) The weapon is then called a rifle. The bad guy raises his gun to fire. Wife blows his hand off and knocks herself over with the recoil. (Sounds like a shotgun again.) The hero grabs the gun and pump another bullet into the chamber (shotguns have pump actions, rifles have bullets) then shoots the bad guy in the shoulder to knock him down (apparently still in rifle mode; a shotgun strong enough to blow off a hand would do some serious damage at that range).

They take the bad guy to a hospital in the rough part of town, where gunshot wounds are commonly treated and often not reported. This guy’s unconscious, missing a hand, has a shoulder that should look like hamburger, and hospital’s just going to patch him up and get his insurance information?

Makes you wonder what else they got wrong. Since this is a socially-conscious book with an ax or two to grind, these doubts are something to be avoided at all costs. Why should the reader take the author’s word on social and racial conditions of almost thirty years ago when easily verified stuff like this is wrong? I’m not saying the racial facts aren’t accurate; I don’t know. And that’s the point. The author clearly wants me to feel a certain way, but I have to accept her facts to do it, and, as the above shows, her facts have shaky foundations.

These are things, along with a few others, that would have been easy to fix, and would have raised the empathy felt for the major characters by increasing the book’s overall believability. Something to think about when a bit of information doesn’t seem important enough to check out while you’re writing.

[I. J. Parker]

To add to my irritation with the 15th century potboiler: They are dining off pocelain an lace table cloths and using silver forks now. This is simply too sloppy for words.

[I. J. Parker]

If I were dealing with firearms in my novels, I would do the research. I did, in fact, for an eighteenth century novel in which an early rifle was being used by a sharpshooter with the private means to have had this new gun specially made. I needed to know about the loading of such a gun.

However, this turns out to be a timely topic because I just received a review for CONVICT'S SWORD on Amazon where the reader (a man) is critical because, he claims, I didn't know that the Japanese never touch a sword blade with their bare hands. I checked. Nobody touches the blade with bare hands. The sword is passed from person to person in its scabbard, though Tora very briefly and lightly touches the cutting edge. Tora, however, is not a swordsman.
My point, then, is, that we can never know what takes a reader out of a book, and we may not be able to avoid this at all.

[Benjamin Sobieck]

The "Pump action = reloading the gun" notion is wholly ingrained in popular culture. That it was missed is not surprising. Still, even a person with Hollywood-doctrined knowledge of firearms should likely know a rifle is not synonymous with a shotgun. It's like "horse" and "donkey." Similar, but not the same.

A pistol was a central weapon in one of my manuscripts. I had to catch myself sometimes to not say revolver. Two very different handguns at issue here. The details I used were lax to cover my bases, since there are so many variations of pistols (your Glock example being one). So it was just "pistol."

Then again, there's always the reliable "boomstick..."

[Dana King]

That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. Certain dtails can be left out and the reader will fill them in for you. If the author puts them in, they need to be right. Given the choice between writing, "They had dinner," and describing the dinner in detail, the author had better describe it accurately, or just say, "They had dinner," and provide as much detail as he's sure of. Those kinds of things can really take me out of a book, especially if they're somehitng a reasonablyintelligent layman would catch.

[I. J. Parker]

I'm not into guns, but I take your point. At the moment I'm listening to an audiobook which purports to tell the story of a 15th century Venetian cook, but just about every detail (and this book being badly overwritten, it is stuffed with detail) sounds suspiciously inappropriate (anachronistic) to the time. But since the book is fairly trashy, I'm not bothering to run down the facts. Potatoes? Surely it took them until the 18th century to become widespread in Europe.