I think it matters much more if it affects the plot. It doesn't matter if a car chase is a bit economical with the truth of London geography by way of making the passing scene vivid (or perhaps making some thematic point by, say, putting in pubs which are actually not all in the same street.) It absolutely does matter if you make the villain get from the Dartford Tunnel to Buckingham Palace to assasinate a corgi, in ten minutes, purely if you were honest that it would take a good hour, the the police would catch up and your plot would fall apart.

And most people think that their particular world experience and specialist knowledge are more universal than they are.

John Gardener in The Art of Fiction says that the basic contract between writer and reader is that the reader will "forget to disblieve" in the events that the writer is telling "as if" they really happened, and in return the writer contracts to deal "honestly and responsibly" with them.

But actually, of course, we all have a tacit understanding of what's permissible to invent or change, (a fictional village outside Manchester, say, or adding a river), and what it isn't (that Manchester is in N E England, that the Thames flows approx W to E, but S to N under Westminster Bridge). So you really can't say that absolute accuracy matters all the time, because we're all inventing and changing stuff all the time, but by a complete tacit ethical system.

But I do also believe that if you absolutely can't reconcile factual accuracy with the needs of your story, then storytelling must win.

For example, in A Secret Alchemy, Elizabeth Woodville had five sisters, all of whom were in waiting on her as Queen at once time or another, as well cropping up in her pre-Royal childhood and married life. I had several scenes where sisters would have been present, but if I'd set out to find out who was when:

a) I might well not have been able to write the novel at all, without several years' work in the public records office to pin down this one minor set of facts, and I'm a novelist, not a historian

b) (and much more importantly) no one sister would have been there often or extendedly enough to be able to become enough of a rounded, interesting character to be the foil to Elizabeth that I needed.

So I picked one sister, Margaret, and used her every time, through the thirty-year span of Elizabeth's narrative. That is "wrong" in terms of accurate history. But it's "right" in terms of how to tell a story.

Emma

<Added>

Golly - a more than usually incoherent and badly proof-read post. Apologies!

I think that's a very good example of what I meant by balance and proportion, Emma. Accuracy was important for the story, up to a point, but beyond that it would have become an excercise in history, rather than story-writing. With any technique relating to story-telling, it's as important to know when to abandon the technique, as to understand its importance to the process.

Alex

I think the biggest problem with factual inaccuracies in fiction is that, as someone has said, it jerks you out of your suspension of disbelief. Some people notice such things far more than others, and some people are obviously more knowledgeable about specialist areas, such as police procedure or medical practice, but if anything jerks you out of your fictional reverie then it spoils the fiction to a greater or lesser extent.

I recently read a friend's piece where he described a consultation with a GP. I've had more to do with doctors than I'd like, and it was all wrong, and the inaccuracies reminded me forcefully that this was just a story someone had made up. Good fiction makes you feel as if it's real.

So I always try to be accurate, esp about things most people will know. If it's something very specialist, that only less than 1% of the audience will know, I guess it's not so bad, but still not ideal.

As a reader or viewer I always want to be inside the fiction, with the protagonists, and not outside it looking in. If it's the latter then the fiction has partially failed for me. Inaccuracies kick me out.

Deb

You can't win, though: I've had editors, in their role of representative readers, query things which are historically accurate, because they don't seem "right". I've always taken that, not necessarily as a prompt to change whatever's in question, but certainly to change how it's written so the reader is more likely to be convinced.

Many, many, many readers are sure of "facts", which are nothing of the kind, but rather the popular view of events as filtered through what they learnt at school about what the record represents.

I'm sure I've quoted this story before, but it's beautifully relevant: when English Heritage were doing up Down House, they had Emma's diaries and letters, describing exactly how they decided to decorate it. But what they did (purple picked out in gold) was so at odds with our idea of early 19th century tastes that, as the Curator said to me, if EH had done that, "no one would have believed us."

In other words, you can be as accurate as you like, but it's no good if you can't convince the reader.

Emma

Very true.

But if you had to either convince the reader OR be accurate, but could not achieve both, which would you choose?

Deb

<Added>

Not that I can think of many instances where that would be the case, if care was taken.

if you had to either convince the reader OR be accurate

Personally, I would have a problem with writing anything that I knew to be inaccurate, even if I thought most readers would believe the inaccurate version to be correct. It would jar me out of the story, every time I encountered it, and that would make the story harder to write.

And, of course, the question presupposes that you, the writer, are aware that you're writing a fact that readers might believe to be incorrect. After spending a long time doing research, it can often be difficult to step back from it and remember what you thought you knew beforehand.

Alex

But if you had to either convince the reader OR be accurate, but could not achieve both, which would you choose?

Often all it takes is making it more explicit, if you can do that without succumbing to info-dump, so that the reader is aware at some sub-concious level that you're writing this deliberately, and so trusts you. For example, in ASA again, I made a character say something like, "And your father will pay for you to go into the church for a Mass, after you're married at the church door," (tho' I hope I wrote it less plonkingly than that) because I knew that not every reader would know that a marriage at that date was an essentially civil ceremony, which usually happened at the church door just because it was the general meeting-point of hte village. If I'd just made that happen as part of the choreography, many more readers would have thought I'd just got it wrong.

If I can't make it "believable" by such means, the next stop is that you just have to reckon that the reader will trust you that you're getting it right. I don't worry about the truly ignorant or historically stupid reader, I mostly rely on trusted readers like my editor and so on. But if I really, really, had to do something accurate which every reader would consider utterly wrong, I'd finesse it. There's no point in writing the novel if it doesn't make a story the reader believes.

And we're writing for readers now. (tho' I realise this is an attitude specific to historical fictioneering) After all, no reader really thinks they're reading a novel written in 1819, or 1492: I write a mean Paston Letter, but it's not a novel. And, indeed, if I really made my MCs talk and behave as they would have, they'd be written off by my readers as sexist, misogynest bigots... Facts of manners, mores and attitudes are facts quite as much as travel times and airline tickets rules.

Indeed, I'm not, actually, pretending anything. I'm evoking people and places and times for the reader by putting little black marks down on the page, and whether the reader does actually, in decoding those little black marks, feel those things evoked, is as much to do with them, as it is to do with me... So I can't refuse to take them into account, if I want my writing to do what I hope it does.

<Added>

And I'd agree wholeheartedly with you, Alex, that the desire to be accurate is a trap, as much as a benefit. All omissions may look like inaccuracies, but that way the dreaded info-dump lies...

All omissions may look like inaccuracies, but that way the dreaded info-dump lies

Yes, I've participated in this thread as a reader of Jean M. Auel's stories, so that colours a lot of my attitude towards accuracy. It has to be accuracy as far as is needed, not accuracy to the point of nit-picking or brain-dumping. Vivid as Auel's stories are, large portions of them are little more than a dump of her research notes (the exception, so far, being The Shelters of Stone, which almost reads as if it were written by a different person). I reckon even I could abridge the first 4 books, without losing any of the vividness, just by stripping out the endless lists of ice-age flora and fauna, and the constant asides about the pharmaceutical uses of plants (which, most of the time, is showing off Auel's knowledge of the subject, rather than imparting anything new about Ayla).

Alex