Making Your Story Believable

Let's say you are writing a historical novel and want to liven it up a little with conversation to start it off. So you have Benjamin Franklin coming home to dinner and telling his wife, "You'll never believe what happened yesterday: Abraham Lincoln was born!"

Your readers will never believe that either. Wait a minute, they'll think. Why would anyone believe that was important, years before Lincoln grew up and ran for president? How would Franklin know anyway, the very next day about a birth hundreds of miles away, years before even the telegraph was invented? Not to mention that Franklin died in 1790, and you have him telling his wife about a birth in 1809?

You might get away with mistakes like that if you were writing for children in the first-grade, but few American adults would take your book seriously.

More often, authors make several little mistakes throughout their story, things that many readers won't pick up on. But if even only a few recognize the errors, they will naturally tell others and the word gets around that this author doesn't know his subject.

I asked a retired school teacher who had lived in Papua New Guinea and now lives in Spokane to critique my novel, "The Samana Incident" after it was published. I should have asked her before publishing. I had worked in PNG for five weeks once, and assumed I knew enough background to get the story right. Here are a few of the errors she pointed out, most of them small, but they add up:

The island is named New Guinea, not Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea is the nation that occupies only the eastern half

An Australian would never say "bloody bandaged arm" unless he was swearing. He would say "bleeding arm".

When people in PNG say kilos, they mean kilograms, as in weight, not kilometers as in distance.

PNG people are great networkers in relationships. Most of my book's characters are seen to be acting as individuals, when in fact they would work in groups.

They do not plant fields, but smaller gardens, and the gardens are most often clan sites, not individual family plots.

She doubts that meat would spoil in only one day in the cool highland climate (causing the epidemic of food poisoning in the story) though it could happen down on the hot coast. One thing she did not mention, and perhaps never knew, was that the main character, Police Lieutenant Kerro, could not have that rank – it doesn't exist. In the real police there, the ranks go from sergeant directly to inspector.

Since then I have interviewed some people who know more than I do about Papua New Guinea, to see if I can put together another book with fewer American mistakes. I went to Coeur d'Alene and interviewed an Australian friend about the way Aussies talk. He advised me not to worry about the word "bloody". He said that when Australian men talk together, bloody is one of the common words they use. I asked him about a couple of other expressions I had heard in the past, like "good-oh" meaning approval. "You don't hear that much any more," he said, “Most often your man would say something like "good on yer." (meaning "good for you.")
 

In The Samana Incident, I could get away with an occasional mistake because the audience is mostly American, and many have some familiarity with illegal drug trade, the theme of the book. But with the next novel in the series, South Sea Gold, I did more research first. PNG has newly discovered vast mineral wealth, and citizens and foreigners eager to exploit it. 
 

This time, I read from the growing literary talent of native PNG writers, I Googled a dozen or more actual actual PNG mines, their dangers and disasters from reports in international news and in the two English-language PNG newspapers. I compared them with historical facts and experience of my own after forty years in North Idaho's mining district, where mines are developed under stricter safety codes. I then combined the woes of several large mines into a single fictitious gold and copper mine owned by foreign interests, dumped into the lap of a fictitious newspaper reporter pitted against crooked industrialists. And promoted police lieutenant Kerro to the rank of inspector, which actually exists.

Movie studios employ "fact checkers" full time to go over a movie script very carefully for mistakes in a plot.We writers have to do that for ourselves because in today's publishing world, most publishers don't offer that service anymore.