Wednesday's Writing on Writing

Don't even think about starting your writing before doing your research.

Your story may be fictitious, but your details had better be correct. I mean, what would you think if you were reading an otherwise engrossing novel and came across this line: "When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas had been a state for only eighteen years."

Excuse me? Everyone knows Kennedy was shot in November of 1963. So Texas came into the Union in 1945? That's an egregious error. It took me sixty seconds to find the state's Web site and learn that Texas was annexed to the United States as the twenty-eighth state in 1845, seceded and joined the Confederacy in 1861, and was readmitted to the Union in 1870.

The story, once your premise has been accepted, must be logical. The technical details have to fit. And anachronisms will jar every time. One of my hobbies is to look for anachronisms – details out of place and time – in movies, stage plays, and novels. For instance, an American flag bearing fifty stars hanging on the wall of an office in the 1930s. Or, in a movie set in the 1950s, a suburban street with ramps carved out of the curbs at intersections so wheelchairs can maneuver easily.

Any American flag made from 1912 to 1959 would only bear forty-eight stars; Alaska and Hawaii were added in 1959. And laws requiring consideration of the disabled are fairly recent developments, too.

In a movie I saw that was set in the late 1930s, a housewife pulled a Tupperware container from the refrigerator. It made me wonder. A quick check on the Internet told me Tupperware made its debut in 1946. Careful writers avoid such gaffes.