Hello, writers. Last week we talked about the Forgotten Smallpox Vials found in a cardboard box in a storeroom at the NIH in Maryland. There was said to be very little chance that the smallpox virus in them was viable, because smallpox virus has to be refrigerated to stay viable and these things had been sitting around somewhere for nearly sixty years.
Whoops. The virus was viable. In two of the vials, anyway, which is plenty.
I mention this because... well actually I mention it because WAUGH! Live smallpox virus! Help! But I also mention it because there is yet another lesson for writers here. If you were writing a bioterrorism thriller, you couldn't have had the virus in two of the vials turn out to be alive, because that's impossible. Even now that it's become possible, you'd still run a risk in using it, because of the Long-Established Fact problem and the Everybody-Knows problem.
For a writer doing research, facts fall into three categories:
1. The newly-discovered fact. (Smallpox virus can remain viable at DC-area room temperatures for decades.)
2. The long-established fact. (Smallpox virus dies at room temperature.)
3. What Everybody Knows. (A whole separate problem.)
The newly-discovered fact is troublesome. On the one hand, if you don't include it in your research, your research will look sloppy to those in the know. (And if your book gets published, those in the know will read it.) On the other hand, widely published sources from a few years ago (or textbooks the reader read in school) may say the newly-discovered fact is not true. This needs to be handled either with a brief afterword or with something not-too-obtrusive in the way of a character making a not-too-info-dumpy remark. (No as-you-know-Bobs).
The What Everybody Knows problem is more insidious. I've run into it with all of my historical novels. And I've seen other writers run into them. Some of the things Everybody Knows about the past:
X - Women's rights were invented in 1967. Before that, the situation was always bad, but the further back you go, the worse it was.
X – Ditto the rights of any marginalized group. As time moved forward, things got better... always.
X - Slavery was strictly a Southern thing.
X - Slaves couldn't read.
X - Women couldn't read.
X - [insert colloquialism here] “sounds modern” and therefore is modern.
X - No one in the past had any idea what caused [insert disease here]
Of course, all of these things were, in various situations and in various time periods, simply not true, but when the author who's done his/her research relies simply on what's true, s/he gets accused of screwing up, making mistakes that could easily have been avoided by anyone with a brain, not knowing what Everybody Knows.
For example, a common complaint in amazon reviews of Karen Cushman's Catherine Called Birdy seems to be that the author's research is off. Everybody Knows girls in the Middle Ages were illiterate. True in most cases. But in Catherine's social class, outside of the clergy, a girl was more likely to be literate than a boy was.
I thought Cushman did a perfectly fine job of explaining in-text how her protagonist became literate-- her brother, a monk, taught her her letters-- but what Everybody Knows is pretty firmly entrenched.
Some problems I've run into with my historicals are that Everybody Knows children can't drive cars and that Everybody Knows that reducing common phrases to initials is a 21st century, internet-fueled phenomenon. (IRL, it was common in the Civil War era.)
Tonight's challenge:
In one of your own specialized areas of knowledge (and let's face it, you've got a few) think of something that Everybody Knows that is actually incorrect.
If you can't think of a fact, use one of mine from the list above.
Write a brief scene in which you use the real, actual fact, not the version Everybody Knows. You don't have to use it directly; it doesn't have to be the focus of the scene. And you don't have to explain it at all, unless you see a natural, unobtrusive way to do so. Try to limit yourself to 150 words.
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