When it's clear no one bothered to research

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shaldna

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I'm reading a book at the minute and one of the characters ENTIRE future plot line is based on a two liner where she tells her partner that they are too old to adopt because you have to be under 40, and he agrees. So, instead of checking it out, they embark on another completely different course of action.

Now, why this bothers me is that the novel is set in the UK, where there is no upper age limit to adopt, only a lower age limit. Both characters had a decent income and would have been prime adoption candidates. If the author had bothered to check.

It's a small point, and normally I would have glossed over it, but it changed the course of the rest of their story, and that's annoying me as I read (I'm finding that I'm also getting twitchy because it's written in present tense, but that's by the by)

Has anyone else come across bad/lack of research that has changed a whole story line? How much did it annoy you?
 

shadowwalker

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Oh heaven's yes! Small things I can put down to artistic license, but things such as your example, where the whole plot hinges on it - no way. That would be one of the books I would not recommend to friends.
 

Ari Meermans

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It depends, really. When I see something that is as factually wrong as the adoption age limit you cited, I tend to assume (at first) the character is lying for their own purposes. If that proves not to be the case, and it was indeed a research error, I become highly annoyed. I won't read that author again.
 

BunnyMaz

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Stuff like that bothers me a bit, because getting the information right is so easy (a quick google would tell the writer) and because the information in this case is key to the plot.

I don't expect a writer to get everything right - sometimes research gets missed because you don't even realise there's a question you should be asking - but I agree it's annoying when something so crucial isn't checked.
 

Persei

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I don't mind minor research mistakes. Sometimes we do get our things wrong, but a mistake being the base of the entire plot, that's completely different. It's like those badly written stories with a (I don't like the term, but I will use it anyway) Sue who simply has something special that doesn't make sense and xe's especial, and the plot is entirely about xir because... Have I mentioned xe's special?

At least the base of the plot should be well researched.

Because come on.
 

jmare

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One example that sticks with me is the Jack Reacher series. Now, I've only read one (The Affair) but there were so many little details, weapons and military protocol, that were just flat out wrong. It really put me off from ever reading anything by Lee Childs ever again.
 

Al Stevens

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Read Christine by Stephen King. If you know about cars, you'll fling the book across the room.
 

kaitie

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I've actively intentionally changed something, a location, because the one I wanted suited my story better, I didn't see any good reason not to, and it was the sort of thing the average person would have no idea about because it was a picky detail. I'm putting it off on being a fantasy alternate reality, but I suppose I might have to change it at some point if someone finds fault with it.

Similarly, I know Stephen King has actively changed locales and roads and even city locations intentionally. That never bothered me, either. Most of the time, I honestly don't care. I'll assume that it was either an intentional shift (it's fiction, after all) or that it was just a minor mistake.

That being said, the book you're reading would have annoyed the heck out of me because it's hinging an entire plot on a made-up rule. I've also seen an (unpublished) book that dealt with a medical issue in a completely wrong way, and again this was a major component of the plot. I feel like anything that's big and has major plot repercussions should either be explained or be well-researched.

Though, I do admit if someone says it takes three hours to drive from Texas to Georgia or something like that, I think less of the author's intelligence.
 

Al Stevens

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With Christine, it is King's blatant ignorance about car makes and parts that sticks out. No literary license lets you turn a Camero into a Ford even if the title character is a haunted Plymouth. And his dialogue between a mechanic and the mc about a tuneup is unintentioally comical. They might just as well have been talking about fixing a refrigerator.
 

Anninyn

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It's so irritating. If it's something minor, I can let it go, but if it has a major impact on the plot, it actually enrages me.

I don't appreciate an author failing to do it - I assume it's either because they're lazy or because they have a poor opinion of the education/intellect of their readers. Those things do not endear me to them.
 

Alexandra Little

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Sometimes it's not whether it has a major/minor impact on the plot, it's how much I care about it. I like volcanoes, so every time an author cites lava as being the main cause of death (which it rarely is - usually it's lahars, pyroclastic flows, or tsunamis), I stop reading.
 

ladyleeona

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I'm reading a book at the minute and one of the characters ENTIRE future plot line is based on a two liner where she tells her partner that they are too old to adopt because you have to be under 40, and he agrees. So, instead of checking it out, they embark on another completely different course of action.

Now, why this bothers me is that the novel is set in the UK, where there is no upper age limit to adopt, only a lower age limit. Both characters had a decent income and would have been prime adoption candidates. If the author had bothered to check.

It's a small point, and normally I would have glossed over it, but it changed the course of the rest of their story, and that's annoying me as I read (I'm finding that I'm also getting twitchy because it's written in present tense, but that's by the by)

Has anyone else come across bad/lack of research that has changed a whole story line? How much did it annoy you?

My suspension of disbelief is pretty stretchy when it comes to entertainment, so most research-fails don't bother me if the story can capture my attention. However, because my field of employment is biology, lots of scientific issues bother the hell out of me. My favorite is plots hinging on organ/marrow donations with absolutely no regard to MHC complex. Drives me bonkers.

But, if the virtually impossible transplant wasn't able to go through, the story would have been dead in the water. Huge case of authorial convenience = me, grumpy.
 

gothicangel

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For me, a deal-breaker is when the author has obviously researched their Roman history into minute detail, but fails to read up on the 'barbarian' cultures [i.e Thrace or Iron Age Scotland.]

Maybe it's me, but when I was at university, I was told to use a minimum of six books for a 1500 word essay. I think I've lost count of how many books I've read for this book. ;)
 

NeuroFizz

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Medical issues are high on my toss-the-author list.
  • when a character sustains a severe injury and the author "forgets" that healing is necessary before the character can do specific activities, or the healing process is accelerated in unreasonable ways.
  • it is unlikely a person hit on the head hard enough to cause a loss of consciousness will wake up and do something heroic (he/she will be extremely sick and likely in need of immediate medical attention)
  • We have all been startled a multitude of times in our lives. Hands up everyone who has peed themselves when scared (excluding those with incontinence issues). Yet this appears to be an acceptable way to "show" one is scared. In actuality, the fight-or-flight (sympathetic) reaction is to tighten the sphincters and relax the general muscle of the bladder.
  • one best-selling author had a stab in the neck sever the victim's aorta. Unless it was a sword used in an awkward downward thrust....
 

shaldna

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Not to nitpick but how far in the future is this?

If it's not present-day then it might be making the assumption that the rules have changed at some point and not for the better.

But I get your beef. Totally.

It's present day, and to make it worse, the whole book is about IVF and babies etc, which the author HAS clearly researched, but has made a whole plot point out of an error - basically either through ignorance or through a means to enable the rest of the plot. Either way, it's lazy and was enough to put me off.

I feel your pain. I recently read a book by a bestseller and the character thinks that taking one birth control pill one time is enough. And it is! Grr...

Medical issues are high on my toss-the-author list.

Medical issues are high on my list too, trust me. As are science fails.

  • when a character sustains a severe injury and the author "forgets" that healing is necessary before the character can do specific activities, or the healing process is accelerated in unreasonable ways.


  • You mean I can't sword fight with a dislocated shoulder?

    [*]it is unlikely a person hit on the head hard enough to cause a loss of consciousness will wake up and do something heroic (he/she will be extremely sick and likely in need of immediate medical attention)

    This too. I've been knocked out through blunt force trauma - it's not fun. I've had concussion and skull fractures (a lifetime working with horses) and it NEVER gets easier. I've woken up in hospital DAYS after the injury. For more minor injuries I've spent a day or two sicking up the contents of my stomach, seeing double and trying to stop the bedspins.

    [*]We have all been startled a multitude of times in our lives. Hands up everyone who has peed themselves when scared (excluding those with incontinence issues). Yet this appears to be an acceptable way to "show" one is scared. In actuality, the fight-or-flight (sympathetic) reaction is to tighten the sphincters and relax the general muscle of the bladder.

    I once peed myself when I fell a bit of a distance and landed so hard on my back that my bladder went 'that's enough for now' and emptied itself.

    In general though, most people, when faced with conflict or stress, will feel a warm tightening in their nether regions, which is, as you rightly said, the muscle contracting ready for the run.


    [*]one best-selling author had a stab in the neck sever the victim's aorta. Unless it was a sword used in an awkward downward thrust....

Ummm......hmm. Yeah. I can't quite see it myself - maybe there was a second swordsman on the grassy knoll.
 

lorna_w

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It's so irritating. If it's something minor, I can let it go, but if it has a major impact on the plot, it actually enrages me.

Pretty much this. And in the age of the internet, why? People slam wikipedia, tho I don't, and thrice in the past two months I've wished an author would have consulted it--it would have given him or her the right information in something like two minutes of effort, info that is right up in the first paragraph of the article. (Twice, I checked, to see how easy it was to fix.) What lazy writers!

But then their best friend, their beta, their agent, their editor, and their copy editor don't fix it. Why?

The problem for me when it is a minor thing is that it also calls all the other facts about things I don't know about into question. So if the author doesn't know that the full moon can only rise at sunset, (or, to echo Alexandra L, that many lava flows your granny with the cane could outrun) what else don't they know? I start reading not like a reader but like a skeptic, and it undercuts tension, because I start thinking "well, there must be some easy way out of this problem, but the author was too lazy to look that up too."

Of course, in my novel I'm querying now, despite all the research I did, I chose to write three tiny things contrary to reality because it worked for my plot. Average readers will never know. People in those fields will know and probably think I'm an idiot. It's not the sort of thing you can easily google, either, one is a technical detail about what X instrument can do with data storage, so I won't get easily caught. But I know and feel a little bad about it.
 

muravyets

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There's a new tv series coming out this fall. Ads all over the place during the Olympics. The ads are so full of realism failures that, from my first sight of it, I declared, "That looks like one of the stupidest things ever made. I don't think I'll waste my time."

It tells us that a loss of electrical power will cause planes to fall out of the sky suddenly like rocks. Not, say, glide to their dooms or non-dooms, depending on the situation and pilot, in accordance with the principals of aerodynamics upon which planes are designed. You know, like they do when on-board power fails, because yeah, it has happened.

It wants us to believe that just 15 years (and I sure hope I heard that wrong, because it sounded like the dude said 15 years) after all the lights go out, the world's cities will be in overgrown ruins and everyone (read: young, good-looking Americans) will get about by riding horses and will fight each other with crossbows, which they will (a) be able to acquire, (b) know how to use, and (c) have all the necessary parts and bolts for.

Yeah, no. Learn how planes work and what makes them drop out of the air and what doesn't. Learn how crossbows work versus other kinds of weapons. Learn why a lack of electricity will not necessarily lead to a lack of guns. (A nice trip to Pakistan where they can make any kind of gun you want by hand, to order, should clear that confusion right up. And you know what, while you're at it, go watch every western ever made and keep at it until you figure out, oh, look, no electricity but yes guns.) Go ride a horse and then hang out around the barn and figure out what that's all about. Go watch a couple of seasons of Life After People to figure out the rest. Then get back to me.

ETA: Oh, and maybe, if the writers of that series don't get too busy, they could look up how to generate electricity, ffs. My only hope is that they at least came up with some partially-assed reason for why that's not possible, and why it's not possible to use steam or water power or any of the other things the industrial revolution was powered with before electricity became the norm. But to be honest, based on watching that plane plummet straight down like it was dropped off a crane (not even a nose-dive, I'm talking belly-flop), I'm not optimistic.
 
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LindaJeanne

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In the rural town where I grew up, a new store started advertising heavily on the radio.

The focus of their advertising was that they were a LOCAL store, not a big chain from the city! This advertising angle might have worked -- if they had pronounced the name of the town -- which they named several times in the radio spot -- correctly.

Either learn how the locals pronounce the name of the town, or focus on some other advertising angle than "buy from us! We're locals!". The juxtaposition was hilarious (and no, they didn't last long.)
 

WildScribe

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I'm afraid I wouldn't have even thought to look up the moon thing, but yeah, the detail fails sort of drive me nuts, too.

I'm currently stuck with my novel because I need to interview like 3 professionals before I can move on at all.
 

muravyets

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I'm afraid I wouldn't have even thought to look up the moon thing, but yeah, the detail fails sort of drive me nuts, too.

I'm currently stuck with my novel because I need to interview like 3 professionals before I can move on at all.
I have that problem, but I've decided to just wing it with Google until I've got the WIP done. I know I may have to rewrite major sections, but I hope I won't have to scrap important plot elements.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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I once lost interest in a book because the MC, who was supposed to be a successful newspaper cartoonist, sat at her drafting table and carefully colored in her original art with watercolors so it could go to print that Sunday. Never mind that it was her daily fifteen minutes of work.

After that, I didn't care.
 

dangerousbill

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I'm reading a book at the minute and one of the characters ENTIRE future plot line is based on a two liner where she tells her partner that they are too old to adopt because you have to be under 40, and he agrees. So, instead of checking it out, they embark on another completely different course of action.

It's a shame, because it's so easy to get around.

Frex,
They might have decided that the kid would reach his teens about the time the wage earner planned to retire, or wouldn't have the energy to ride herd on a randy teenager, and they agree that adopting a kid would be a mistake in the long term.
 

WildScribe

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I have that problem, but I've decided to just wing it with Google until I've got the WIP done. I know I may have to rewrite major sections, but I hope I won't have to scrap important plot elements.

Not sure how much more winging it I can do. One of the characters is about to train as a K9 unit (well, the human half) and I need firsthand experiences and descriptions of how that training process works. The other is about to volunteer at a women's shelter, which again is something that is sort of hard to wing, as an experience, just from google searches.

I managed to google cop funerals and call my cop father for lots of details so far, but I'm getting into minute stuff that will make or break the story, and I just CAN'T make myself write a crappy scene and come back and fix it later.
 
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