The devil's in the detail

Lynne Patrick

The arts section of the Sunday newspaper I read has a column of readers’ letters commenting on the previous week’s TV programmes. Mostly, as you’d expect, the letters are grumbles. Occasionally, though not often, major complaints about the quality of the shows; more frequently there are little niggles, especially about tiny historical details in period drama. The Routemaster debate has almost become a running joke.

Routemasters are the big red buses which used to make up half the public transport service in London, then were discontinued, and now have been brought back with a new, improved design. They’ve been through several incarnations, and to people who take notice of these things, it’s vital to match the right type of Routemaster to the exact year in which the drama is set. People care about these things.
Some people, anyway.

Personally, I can’t tell one big red bus from another. But reading the latest in one of my favourite crime fiction series earlier this week, I did come across a child aged eighteen months who was being spoon-fed something mushy by his mother. If memory serves, and in this case I think it does pretty well, the average eighteen-month-old (not that my child was ever average, you understand) has enough teeth to chew small chunks of food (not to mention worms, gravel and bread thrown out for the birds), and enough hand-eye co-ordination and sense of independent self to make him/her willing and able to feed him/herself, so has usually graduated on to a chopped-up version of adult food.

Which only goes to show that I can be as picky as the Routemaster critics.

It also goes to show, though, that getting the details right matters more than a little. The child in question is incidental to the plot, just as the buses are only background in the drama; but not only was my attention distracted from the story for several minutes, but if the author had been unfamiliar, I might have begun to wonder what else he had got wrong. As it stands, he’s a dozen books into the series and I’ve read every one with great pleasure and total absorption, and his own kids are almost grown up, so he gets the benefit of the doubt for this minor glitch.

All the same, I’m tempted to go off on another ‘this is why authors need editors’ riff, and up to a point that’s true – but it doesn’t always work, does it? Editing books in the past, I’ve picked up details like a siren on a police car at a time when they all had bells, and the name of the street on which a protagonist lived changing from one book to the next. But what if the editor of the first had been too young to remember bells on police cars? And what if a different editor had been appointed mid-series for the second example? And how many similar details have I missed because I didn’t realize there was something I needed to research?

No editor can be expected to be an expert on every background detail. I always smile when I read the acknowledgements most authors include, in which they thank everyone from the publisher to the woman next door who picked the kids up from school; usually on the list are several expert professionals who have been consulted on certain technical aspects of the narrative, and there’s always a rider along the lines of ‘any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine and mine alone’. The smile is wider when the book is police procedural, because real-life policemen love to wail, ‘This is all wrong! It never happens like that!’

When I used to ‘teach’ fiction writing (quote marks indicate not so much false modesty, more my ongoing scepticism about whether people can be taught to write), I often raised a topic I called reader credibility: the ability to make the reader believe that what you’ve written could happen. To my mind, that’s why the details are important. If the author who had forgotten how babies develop had been less familiar, the doubts about the quality of his research might have started to creep in.

The devil really is in the detail. Writers have enough demons; the fewer find their way on to the page, the better.

Comments

[Dana King]

To me, he level of outrage should always be equal to the level of detail attempted. If the character fires a gun, fine. If fires a Glock 17, then the number of shots and magazine and safety references should be accurate.

Especially in historical novels, where the author hopes to make points with his or her knowledge of the period, the burden of accuracy of such details should always be on the author. It's their name on the front of the book, and they'll get the credit if everything rings true; they should accept the blame when they drop the ball. If that's too much work for an author, write something that requires less research.

[Lynne Patrick]

Good point, Dana. I wonder from time to time whether we should cut other writers some slack, but really we shouldn't, should we? And we should all we equally meticulous.