If lil_shepherd is on your flist, you want to get her going on Willis and research! There may still be a post on her LJ about the series . . .
Willis had me rolling my eyes at various points of The Doomsday Book where she could have done with a Brit-checker (why do fanfic writers have them and pro writers don't?!) If I was writing a book set in the US, I'd get someone to check it for me -- especially dialogue, as American English speech patterns don't sound at all like UK ones.
No idea if they have hummingbirds in mainland Europe or not -- but if I was writing a book set in Germany, I'd check! You can't assume ever that creatures cross international boundaries -- I remember falling around laughing at some fanfic a while back which had skunks in the UK!
I suppose the question is at which point a writer thinks she has to do research and when she assumes she knows something. I reviewed a book a while back where the whole plot hinged on someone getting on a train and then getting straight off and going to commit a murder. Except, I'd commuted that line every day for ten years and knew the slam-door trains were long gone -- they were now electric doors which locked when the train started moving and didn't open again until the guard released the lock at the next station.
It pissed me off so much that I did what the author could easily have done and phoned the train operator's press office to check. Once the guy had stopped laughing, he confirmed that there hadn't been slam-door trains on that line since dinosaurs walked the earth *g*.
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Date: 2011-03-01 07:00 pm (UTC)Willis had me rolling my eyes at various points of The Doomsday Book where she could have done with a Brit-checker (why do fanfic writers have them and pro writers don't?!) If I was writing a book set in the US, I'd get someone to check it for me -- especially dialogue, as American English speech patterns don't sound at all like UK ones.
No idea if they have hummingbirds in mainland Europe or not -- but if I was writing a book set in Germany, I'd check! You can't assume ever that creatures cross international boundaries -- I remember falling around laughing at some fanfic a while back which had skunks in the UK!
I suppose the question is at which point a writer thinks she has to do research and when she assumes she knows something. I reviewed a book a while back where the whole plot hinged on someone getting on a train and then getting straight off and going to commit a murder. Except, I'd commuted that line every day for ten years and knew the slam-door trains were long gone -- they were now electric doors which locked when the train started moving and didn't open again until the guard released the lock at the next station.
It pissed me off so much that I did what the author could easily have done and phoned the train operator's press office to check. Once the guy had stopped laughing, he confirmed that there hadn't been slam-door trains on that line since dinosaurs walked the earth *g*.