Dear Author

[neadods]

(wow, it's been a while since I wrote one of these!)

Dear Author:

I know that you're British. I know that you're trying to set a scene very quickly. I know that America is surprising in how much territory our regional accents cover.

But just for the record, not everyone from New York sounds like they come from Brooklyn. And for that matter, Guys and Dolls is not an accurate record of Brooklynese.

Also - and again, I get it that you're British and this may be something that you either don't think about or don't want to think about, BUT! 1976 was kind of an important year in America. Especially July. Something about an anniversary of something, now what was it, it involved guys in red coats and a Declaration and some fighting, and yes we've made up and all, but you may have heard the odd mention of the event in your history classes?

SERIOUSLY. We as a nation didn't look up on July 4, 1976 and go "wow, it's the Bicentennial!" and then forget about it 24 hours later. Yes, it was particularly intense in early July, but it was kind of a year-long thing, especially for any state that counts as one of the original 13 colonies.

So, no, setting a story in New York on July 16, 1976 and not mentioning a certain little detail even in passing kind of stands out, no matter what the story is really about.

It especially stands out to old coots who *remember* 1976. Not all of your audience is knee high, I'm just sayin'.

Comments

[lukadreaming.livejournal.com]

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*.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Willis had me rolling my eyes at various points of The Doomsday Book where she could have done with a Brit-checker

What kept throwing me out of both Passages and Domesday Book was that they were both set in a vague future - but that MASSIVE amounts of plot deal with trying to get messages to/contact someone else in a world that had all kinds of advances except cell phones. And all that emphasis on communication only threw a glaring spotlight on the issue.

[fyrdrakken]

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?!)

The degree of immediate connection between a fic writer and their audience is a profound thing. I really noticed the shift in my way of thinking that first year I was in online fandom when I closed a profic book and had the strong urge to e-mail feedback to the author. Of course people do send fanmail IRL, and had been doing so for centuries, but it's never a thing that occurred to me before I started reading things written by people I already shared a mailing list or exchanged e-mails with. And for that matter, nowadays I notice more and more books with the authors website included in the prefatory matter, or dedications thanking mailing list members or posters at a bulletin board or whatever other online form of contact and aggregation, for support services, research and/or critique for the work in question.

[suze2000.livejournal.com]

Ah, I enjoyed the slam-door trains. :) Even though I only travelled on them once or twice, as I'm Australian. Mind you, if you wanted a little nap on the train, forget it!

Thanks for the memory.

[lukadreaming.livejournal.com]

*g*. I do remember them rather fondly, even if you had to be a contortionist when you leaned out of the window to open the door at a station!

And they were very useful for fic writers who wanted people to leap off moving trains...

Which was what the writer I was whining about was banking on *g*.

[suze2000.livejournal.com]

I lament the demise of the routemaster bus as well. Especially on Oxford St, where you'd often want to jump off well between stops. You can't anymore and the stops are too far apart to be helpful on such a busy street.