Knowing when to fake it

[layla]

I’m working on edits to my urban fantasy novel this afternoon and thinking about research. I just got back from three and a half weeks in the New York area, partly to visit my sister and partly to research my novel. (And my heart goes out to everyone who’s suffered and is still suffering in Hurricane Sandy; some of the places that flooded are places where I was just standing a week ago. To all of you on the East Coast, I hope that you and yours are safe!)

During my time in Ithaca and environs, I did pick up quite a few details that I’d gotten wrong (hence the revisions!), as well as collecting impressions to (hopefully) convey the sort of local flavor that you can only get from spending a lot of time in a place or talking to people who have.

But eventually I started to hit a point where I was researching things that I suspect 99.9% of locals don’t even know, which made me realize that there’s a certain point beyond which it makes just as much sense, if not more sense, to make things up rather than trying to get them exact in every detail. An example: we drove out to Trumansburg (a small town northwest of Ithaca) to see what grew in the ditches, since I have a scene where the characters scramble through a tangle of blackberry vines in a ditch beside the road near Trumansburg. And then I realized … who actually cares? It’s important to research the sort of details that people would notice if you got wrong (like the kind of doors on a particularly well-known Cornell building; I had gotten it all wrong before actually walking around campus). But then there’s the sort of thing that you can totally make up, provided you have some basic knowledge of the general area. I wouldn’t put blackberry brambles in a ditch if I were writing something set in Alaska, because they don’t grow wild here. That’s exactly the sort of detail that detail-nitpicking locals might notice (I know I would!) and go “Hey, wait a minute.” But blackberries grow wild in New York, and could quite plausibly grow in a roadside ditch, and I’m not convinced that scrutinizing the actual ditches in the actual Trumansburg area to see if any of them have blackberry thickets (and if not, what they do have) is a good use of my time.

And there are even some times when it’s actually better to fake it rather than using a real business or a real neighborhood, especially if you plan to blow it up. *g* Giving yourself permission to make things up also gives you more freedom to, say, give your building exactly as many floors as it needs for your plot, regardless of whether the actual buildings in the area are four stories or five. Aside from perhaps an architecture student, who stands around counting floors on the buildings in their neighborhood? Who’s going to notice if you add or subtract one?

I’ve always disagreed with those who describe fiction as a form of lying, but it is a sort of augmented reality, and as long as you know enough to plausibly fake it, I think you can totally get away with it. If you’ve never even SEEN a farm, then probably you should do a bit of research before writing about one, but I’ve spent enough time on and around farms that I think I can get away with writing plausibly about farm country even if I’m not up on the exact details of what the ditches look like in that particular spot of farm country.

(For the record, in this case, I think the blackberry thicket is plausible based on what I saw on our drive. Most of the area seems to have shallower, less overgrown ditches than I had imagined, but I also saw places that were similar enough to what I’d envisioned that I don’t think it would jump out as wrong to someone who was familiar with the area. And I had fun exploring, so it’s not like it was a waste of time! But even if the scene doesn’t correspond exactly to reality, exploring the ditches to figure out what grew in them was probably a completely pointless level of research, unless it was going to be tremendously important to the plot. Which it isn’t.)

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[ambyr]

Aside from perhaps an architecture student, who stands around counting floors on the buildings in their neighborhood? Who’s going to notice if you add or subtract one?

Depends! I live in a city with a strict height limit on buildings; a max-height building is 11-12 stories, maybe 13 if the ceilings on each individual floor are very low. And you'd better believe I notice if authors or screenwriters decide to plunk a skyscraper around here.

Sorry. Pet peeve :grin:.

[layla]

*grins* No need to be sorry; it's an excellent point! And also, a great example of how, if you're going to fake stuff, you have to do enough research to be able to fake things convincingly. You don't need to know the location of every maple tree on Main Street, Sometown, but you do need to know if all the maples in Sometown were cut down five years ago because they were interfering with the power lines (or whatever).