Common Ridiculous Research Fails
I’m writing a chapter on research for my Well-Presented Manuscript book, and looking for things that writers often get wrong through ignorance.
At the moment I have:
Phases of the moon (multiple moons in the same part of the sky will have the same phase; not everyone knows this, apparently, because they don’t know how moon phases work).
Guns. A revolver is not an automatic, and a rifle is not a shotgun, and they differ in ways that can be important to the story.
Any other examples of things that you see frequently in books that make you roll your eyes?
(Hollywood physics and Hollywood human biology kind of get a genre pass.)
“Hacking” in general.
Historical clothing. The correct terms for garments, how they’re worn, how they close (assuming they do, that is), and so on.
Oh, yes, those are both good.
Even “semiautomatics” are not automatics. I see this error in popular media and news outlets as well as fiction.
Avalanches being triggered by loud sounds.
The legal system (in the US) and how courts actually work. You can thank Law and Order [insert anything] for totally skewing people’s idea of how the law and courtrooms really work.
Really, Andy Brokaw? That’s not true?
Mike Reeves-McMillan It’s a myth. See https://utahavalanchecenter.org/faq for a few other avie myths I’ve seen and rolled my eyes at.
Andy Brokaw if I remember correctly, there was some famous avalanche caused by thunder. Early 20th century. But, I could be remembering incorrectly.
Writers almost always get hacking wrong too.
Michael Williamson I haven’t heard of an avalanche caused by thunder and googling the words together gets me sports results. In theory, a loud enough sound could cause enough vibration, but the materials from avalanche certification classes in the US say that would be sonic boom level of noise.
Mr. Brightley is a physicist, and he says “all kinds of science.” He didn’t have any examples off the top of his head, but generally science in novels makes him roll his eyes.
The time to arrive at any kind of post-event forensics analysis is actually much longer than many writers would like to think. Certain parts of science just take longer in the lab than non-scientists realize. Nuclear, radiological, and even just regular explosive forensics are not instantaneous. Also, forensics is not attribution – forensics tells you what happened; it doesn’t tell you who did it or why.
How very noisy death is. People always seem to die with a quiet gasp. They should moan and scream and linger.
I think what we’re heading into here is “fictional tropes that are based on myths,” which wasn’t exactly where I wanted to go with it (though that too is worth discussing). Not so much “this real-world phenomenon works differently from how it works in the movies (and books by people who’ve only seen it in the movies),” more “a lot of people think of X and Y as the same thing, but anyone who knows anything about the subject knows they’re not” (like the guns example).
It’s a difficult line to draw, and I don’t think I’m drawing it well. Try this: cinematic is when guns never need reloading, even though everyone knows they do. It’s a trope. Research fail is when those guns are described as automatics on page 63 and by page 67 they’re revolvers.
I’m fascinated by how often writers get the relative distance of time in history wrong. Just because something happened 3400 years ago doesn’t mean that people who lived 3300 years ago had any clue that it ever happened. While 3300 and 3400 might seem similar as in ‘when it happened in relation to our time’ there is still 100 years of difference for the people who lived then.
Andy Brokaw this link is about the avalanche I was remembering. It was attributed to both “rain and thunder.” I’m not sure how much the sound of the thunder had an effect. http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=5127
Mike Reeves-McMillan I think, maybe, that the tropes and the lack of good research are symptoms of the same problem. A writer doesn’t know enough of the subject to know when they are making mistakes. Either we treat shotguns as rifles, or we make up elaborate, but faulty hacking scenes while remaining oblivious to our errors. (Because if we knew there were errors, we’d fix them.)
True. But I have some tolerance for tropes that assist storytelling or make things “cooler”. For example, forensics taking a realistic amount of time would slow down the story too much. As a reader, I know how long it really takes, but for the sake of the story, I don’t care. As a writer, I might know how long it really takes but decide that I’m not going to let that stand in my way; I’ll choose to ignore an inconvenient reality.
Whereas having three moons in different phases in the same part of the sky (unless your setting is very fantastical indeed and logic just doesn’t apply) is simply wrong. Having a rifle become a shotgun in the course of a scene, or using a rifle to shoot quail, is simply wrong. It’s not cooler or better storytelling to use the wrong thing instead of the right one. If I know the right one, I’ll use it.
Basic facts about the cities their stories are set in. If you can’t be bothered to find out if Ottawa has a subway system, don’t try to set your subway-tunnel-adventure in Ottawa.
It might not 100% qualify, but here’s a fail I noticed in a short story I recently read.
The author casually mentions that our POV character is a humanoid robot. He weighs as much as a car, apparently.
Later on in the story he leans on a bar top. The weight of a car. On a bar top. Wouldn’t it, like, y’know, break under such weight? Cars are pretty heavy, right?
Dogs (and many other animals) can, in fact, see colour. They may see a different range than we do, but they don’t see in black and white.
Wolves are not dangerous monsters who gang up on a human and attack them. Wolves are fairly timid creatures.
Male lions do very little hunting. That is woman’s work, as far as they are concerned.
Oh! And – when mentioning time, count it out to see how long that time actually is. I often see “She said nothing for a minute” or “It was several minutes before he spoke again.”
That’s a LONG time to pause in the middle of a conversation. Try it and see.
Crikey where do I start? There are a lot of pet peeves, and some of them are fairly pedantic (the difference between a clip and a magazine for firearms say). But one of my biggest eye-rollers is the idea that armor makes you slow. So slow you’re better off not wearing it. Even if the armor made you marginally slower than an unarmored foe, you were way less stabbable/choppable than that fellow. Advantage: armor. Related is the idea that swords, especially longswords and twohanders, are heavy and clumsy. The resurgence of historical fencing and Western martial arts have lessened these in recent years, but I still see it way too much.
That’s what I call “Hollywood human biology”.
I recently read a novel in which the genius engineer protagonist ‘welds’ wires with a soldering iron. Killed my immersion, almost prompted a rant on Goodreads.
On the flip side, in the same novel, the protagonist spends a great deal of time driving monotonously around detailed routes of far flung locales, describing landmarks and architecture. So I guess research can be used for both good and evil.
Lisa Blair I was going to mention sex too, but then felt overwhelmed. Where to start?