Jeri Smith-Ready

Stickler I be

It's the little things that kill
Tearin' at my brain again.
--Bush (the band), "Little Things"

As I'm revising my fantasy novel, the first book I've ever written that's not set in a modern time and place, I find myself making an enormous effort to get the little details right.

Case in point: last night I came to a part where one of the characters uses fresh chamomile flowers as a medicinal to help someone sleep. Yet chamomile only blooms in June and July, and the scene takes place in late summer/early fall. Argh! I had to rewrite it so that the character found the dried chamomile in a shed instead of picking it by moonlight, which I thought sounded much cooler.

My feeling is that when an author is expecting readers to believe in a non-ordinary setting, it's all the more important to get the reality-based details correct. Doing so lends the work more credence, and a reader will be more likely to buy the whole "you can do magic" business.

(Oh, great, now I have that America song stuck in my head. Share it with me, won't you*?)

I'm a beast when it comes to ecological or economical accuracies, since those are the two areas of reality I know anything about. I once edited another author's fantasy manuscript in which part of the society formed a cult around an animal that not only didn't inhabit that biome, but didn't even exist in that hemisphere. Many fantasy and science fiction novels make me wonder, where did they get the money to build that castle/warp drive? The tax structure must be brutal.

My husband made the following comment: "It's an alternate world. Why can't things work differently there?"

Maybe he's right. Maybe I shouldn't labor over what forms of liquor could realistically be created in a high mountain forest with no access to agricultural products (something made from fermented berries, perhaps?). Maybe I shouldn't worry about whether people will throw my book against the wall if I have a character harvesting wild carrot seed in the spring.

But I fear that letting the little things go, with the assumption that readers will forgive my lapses because it's "just fantasy," invites a kind of creative anarchy. If we want our genre to gain more respect, we can't fudge facts, not even for the sake of the story, much less for the sake of "it sounds cool."

What do you think? Do you watch Return of the King and wonder where all those people in the city of Minas Tirith get their food? (First person who says "lembas bread" gives me twenty pushups.)

*Together now, sing it:

Doo doo doo do do DOO
Doo doo doo do dooo, DOO!

• posted by Jeri @ 4:57 PM
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