When Reality Becomes Fiction

 By Mark W. Danielson

Writing non-fiction can be a lot of fun, but it also requires tremendous scrutiny.  While I prefer accuracy in fictional details, there is no room for error in non-fiction.  In fact, the only thing worse than errors in non-fiction is stealing someone else’s work.  Case in point, reflect on how plagiarism tarnished author Stephen Ambrose’s credibility.

I am currently involved in co-writing a biography, and it has been one of my most challenging works because my collaboration does not involve direct research.  Instead, my job is to turn the presented material into a publishable document. 

The story is one of an immigrant who enlisted in the Marine Corps and becomes a fighter pilot.  A genius that invented air-to-air radar missiles and shot down two MIG 15s on a dark Korean night.  A man so brilliant that President Kennedy asked him to get out of the Marine Corps and go into the private sector.  A man that eventually took us to the moon as NASA’s Chief Engineer for NASA’s Apollo space program.  Sound interesting?  I thought so. 

In the eyes of the co-author, I was the perfect choice to help write this story.  After all, I flew fighters from the same Korean air base a generation later, am a US Navy TOPGUN graduate and air-to-air combat instructor, have published over one hundred non-fiction articles and four novels, and I believe in this story.  But progress has been slow because my understanding of non-fiction is different from my co-author.  While I believe that facts are facts, he thought we could re-write history to give the story more flair.  Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.  I will never put my name on anything that isn’t true, even under a pseudo name.   

During our last meeting we agreed that he would organize every one of his documents by date, create an accurate timeline, and start over.  Many moons will pass before I become involved in this project again.  However, taking a break is good because whatever material he presents will then be fresh. 

My reason for mentioning this is because any inaccuracy in a non-fiction work will forever cost an author his or her credibility, and without credibility there is no chance of publishing non-fiction again.  Stephen Ambrose’s infractions still haunt his grave.   

To protect yourself, never rely on Internet research, question every source, and consider that every picture relevant to your topic could be Photoshopped.  Most importantly, have an independent source that is familiar with the topic review your work before ever sending it on.    

Writing About Foreign Locations

By Chester Campbell

Writing mysteries with foreign locations can cause some difficulties, but when I started penning novels in the early nineties, I plunged ahead without hesitation. You do that when you're young (I was only sixty-seven then). My second book, still unpublished, was set largely in Korea, with smaller sections in Hungary and Thailand. I'm currently revising it with a new market in mind.

For the Korean part, I had the advantage of having spent a year in Seoul during the Korean War in 1952-53, plus a visit there during a tour of the Far East in 1987. I also had a Korean daughter-in-law who provided some information on customs in the country. I read lots of other views of the Hermit Kingdom, including those in various travel books.

The title of the book is The Poksu Conspiracy. Poksu in Korean means "vengeance." I found enough expressions in phrase books to give the story a realistic feel. Transliterations of Oriental languages with odd alphabets are notably inconsistent, but I tried to stick with spellings used in the media for better known words. After completion of the manuscript, I had it read by a Korean college student to catch any inaccuracies.

For the portion set in Thailand, I used the area around Chaing Mai, a popular tourist destination in the northern part of the country. In checking on Google, I found the city has grown tremendously in the past quarter century. The metropolitan area now includes a million population. I had visited Chaing Mai as part of that month-long Far East tour in 1987.

The Hungarian setting was a bit different. I had never visited that part of Europe. I read several books to get a feel for the people and the country. My chapters were set in Budapest, and I found a copy of National Geographic that included lots of good photos and details of locations I used in the story.

Using foreign locations in mysteries isn't all that difficult if you're willing to do the research. As best I recall, Martin Cruz Smith wrote Gorky Park without ever visiting the Soviet Union. Reading the book, you'd have thought he had lived there. Have you written foreign locations? If so, how did you handle it?

Visit me at Mystery Mania

Research in Depth

By Chester Campbell

I suppose I've become lazy the past few years while I continued to write PI mysteries set around Nashville. They haven't required much research as I'm writing about a city I've known intimately for most of my life. If I need to refresh my memory on something, all it takes is a little drive-by "research." I've also chosen subjects I'm familiar with that needed little more than Googling.

It wasn't always like this. When I started writing mystery novels in earnest, after retiring in 1989, I chose the subgenre I'd read avidly since the end of World War II, the spy story. I wrote a trilogy of international thrillers set at the end of the Cold War. They feature a disgraced former FBI agent who gets involved in espionage. None of the three sold, far a variety of reasons (I had a different agent for each of them). I've been revising them lately with an eye to putting them up as ebooks.

During this process, I've been fascinated at recalling the amount of research I did on these books. I had read extensively about the CIA and the KGB, and I bought several newer books for background. One major challenge was the variety of locations around the globe. I spent a lot of time at the library going over travel books and memoirs by people who had lived in the areas.

Locations my characters visited in the first two books included Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Chiang Mai, Thailand. At the time I wrote the stories, I had never been to Israel. Having toured the country and seen Tel Aviv in 1998, I was quite pleased at how well I had described the setting. I only made a few tweaks based on firsthand knowledge.

I toured the Southeast Asian locations in 1987 when my wife and I joined our younger son (then with Army Special Forces) and his wife on a 30-day junket that included Korea, Okinawa, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. Of course, I had also spent a year in Seoul at Fifth Air Force Headquarters in 1952-3 during the Korean War. I did additional reading on the areas while researching my spy stories.

Most of the U.S. cities in the books were ones I was familiar with. One fictional location I created was a small island off the Florida Gulf Coast. I visited the area and consulted with seamen at the Apalachicola, Florida Coast Guard Station to keep things realistic.

The last book in the trilogy has the most areas I've never seen. It includes a remote corner of Iran, parts of Ukraine, and Minsk, Belarus. It is set in the early nineties, and I did extensive research on conditions in the areas.  I also used parts of Mexico, some of which I had visited. The stories include many technical details that I researched extensively, much of it in cooperation with my "technical adviser," brother Jim, an electrical engineer.