Who reads the final draft of your book before you decide it's ready to submit to Agents? I have almost finished my novel about a Far East Prisoner of War and feel it's time to let some of my friends who are fiction readers to give feedback on how it flows and what they feel could be left out? Does anyone else do this?
Hi, Kate!
"(Virginia Woolf probably knew it gets mighty cold in Patagonia even if she'd never been there herself.)"
Perhaps. And - never having been to Patagonia - I can't swear that it doesn't sometimes get mighty cold there in February. But I DO know that February is high summer there.
I read the little that I read of this novel in my early 20s, over 35 years ago. I can't remember just where this intellectual colony was sited, but I believe that it was further north than Patagonia, and I believe that it was on the Atlantic coast. Perhaps Brazil? I can't even remember the title of the book. What I DO remember is that Ms. Woolf wrote about the CHANGE in the weather, that it was getting remarkably colder, that the nights were getting longer. And this in a month when the opposite should be true. Or - conceding that it MIGHT have been in that relatively small portion of South America north of the Equator - it would have been so near the Equator that it wouldn't have made such a difference as to be remarkable. Not, at least, on the coast.
What the [aborted] reading of that novel taught me - and it's a lesson that I've never forgotten, so "Thank you, Virginia!" - is that even novelists with great reputations are capable of dropping clangers (ESPECIALLY if they're showing off by writing on a subject about which they haven't the foggiest)... and that some readers (e.g. myself) are real pedants, slow to forgive shoddy research.
The Deary knows, Julie, that I'm not accusing you of shoddiness... or showing off. (Aside from the fact that ALL writers are show-offs: it's what we do, show the World what we're thinking, what's important to US.) For all I know, you grew up in Vietnam and your mother was a POW. Or maybe you're a conscientious researcher. I'm just speaking generally. But even if you are an expert on the subject (or an expert researcher), it wouldn't hurt to have another expert read your book for mistakes that you might have missed.
I admit that I was a bit harsh with Ms. Woolf. There's a film that I rather like - Isabel Coixet's "My Life Without Me" in which at least THREE clangers are dropped (one of them almost deafeningly), without making me dislike the film as a whole. Perhaps I mellowed with age.
a) The cleaning staff in a school, working in the evening after school's out, clean each blackboard using blackboard erasers: those rolled up strips of cloth that teachers used to hurl across the room at dozy students.
b) The main character says that she was born in December, then follows that with: "I'm Aquarius". Actually, this is not necessarily a clanger on the director's part. maybe it was a case of a character who doesn't know her astrology.
c) Here's The Champ. And this is a NURSE speaking. She relates how new-born Siamese twins were left to die in a hospital because they had no chance of surviving. But, although they were doomed to die, she defied doctors' advice and insisted on holding them: in showing them tenderness until the final moment. Paraphrased from memory (this is going back a decade or 2): "The boy died first. The girl lived for a few more hours, connected to her dead brother. and then she, too, died."
OUCH!!!
History buffs might be able to help with checking for accuracy, too, as well as those that know the countries.
(Virginia Woolf probably knew it gets mighty cold in Patagonia even if she'd never been there herself.)
But any avid reader will be able to give you their thoughts about the readability or plot holes, even if they've never given much thought before to the era or geography of your setting.
Do you have experience of the Far East yourself? Have you got friends who have? I have (both), but I'm over-booked as it is.
I put down one of Virginia Woolf's novels and never picked it up again (or any of her other novels) when I got to the bit about the colony of Brit intellectuals in South America dealing with the harsh winter in February. (I may have the month wrong: I stopped reading this book decades ago. Possibly Dec., Jan., or March.) Even those parts of South America which are north of the Equator are so close to it that February wouldn't be bitterly cold. Not on the coast, anyway.
Here's another one for you: "Fish, sea lions, and penguins are the chief ingredients of a polar bear's diet." (Not in the Woolf book, but did you spot the clanger?)
As to the Far East, anybody who mimics a Chinese accent with "You are a rong, rong way from home, Mistel Rester," is only flaunting their ignorance. And mighty proud of it, too.
Either write about what you know about (which COULD be the result of some excellent research) or go so over-the-top with inaccuracies that your public will know that it's all tongue-in-cheek. (And I doubt that that's your intention in the novel that you've described.)