This is for all the fiction writers out there. I’m going to combine this blog post with a bit of a rant about a passion of mine—research.

Several years ago, I went to see one of the latest block-buster Hollywood movies, which was filmed in Sydney, a town with which I’m very familiar. In the film, the main characters flew in over the harbour (great shots) and then somehow managed to drive from the airport to the CBD, crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge on their way to get there. The whole audience burst out laughing. Someone either didn’t do their research, or more likely didn’t give a rat’s arse about getting it right for the sake of a good glimpse of the harbour, bridge and the Opera House.

Why is getting the route right important might you ask? Well, not only were my friends and I disillusioned, but that error stayed in our minds right through the film. We spoke about it after the movie was over; how could we take the quality of the experience seriously if such a basic error had been made? We agreed that all of us had spent far too much time keeping our eyes open for other mistakes, at the expense of being immersed in the film. It takes nothing to write a letter, pick up the phone, search the internet to get basics right.

If you’re a traveller, just think about how different it is simply ordering a coffee in a coffee shop in most other countries than your homeland. I had a text message conversation with a friend who was holidaying in Italy, asking me to describe (in Italian) to the waiter what it was she regularly ordered from her local hangout back home. The language wasn’t the barrier, it was the product, the procedure, and the ritual. “Double shot, long black in a cup with cold milk on the side”, isn’t universal. What size is the cup? Is it a double shot ristretto, or a long double shot …? Anyone who’s eaten Chinese food in both Sydney and San Francisco will tell you the same dishes, although with similar ingredients, don’t taste the same.

As a writer, these sorts of small details are very important. Once you make a blooper about history or place in your writing, you’ve basically lost your reader—maybe for the moment, and maybe even worse, for the rest of your story. It would be the same as publishing your book with spelling and grammar mistakes on the back cover. Most readers would think to themselves that if the basic information is wrong, what’s the rest of the book going to be like?

Getting it right, or doing your damned best to get it right, is a pre-requisite of gathering your audience, keeping them interested in you as an author, and as a bonus, a way of helping you sleep well at night. Even if people don’t like what you write, you need to be able to rest easy that you’ve done everything you can to be as historically/ geographically accurate as possible. I promise you, there are people out there who’ll write to you and pull you apart for getting the colour band wrong on a threepenny tram ticket in 1956!

Over the years, I’ve written personal messages and sent emails to the archivists at the Royal Collection, the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the Wallace Collection, the Royal Archives, the Australian War Museum, and to Bonham’s, the London Auction House, to name but a few.

I’ve posted requests for information from returned servicemen who subscribe to internet groups in Australia, the UK, the USA, Germany, France, and New Zealand. I’ve solicited information from orthopaedic surgeons, trauma specialists, experts on the history of medicine, and lately, on theatre historians and speakers of a quickly vanishing Indigenous Australian language. Not one of the people I’ve written to has been reluctant to help.

So, tell me why, when I watched the recent otherwise excellent series of Peace and War, with amazing costuming, locations, and huge budget, were people dancing at a ball to music that had not been written yet, and whose composer was yet to be born?

Why did I see an otherwise wonderfully constructed wartime drama have a greengrocer shop stacked to the roof with oranges, lemons, peaches, and bananas? The only answer is as I’ve written above, either someone didn’t give a stuff, or didn’t think to ask. More likely, they didn’t think to bring in an expert in the field for advice, or to consult.

I belong to a group of theatre friends in which there’s a lot of eye-rolling about women’s makeup and men’s facial hair in nineteenth century costume drama. In this period, only prostitutes plucked their eyebrows, wore mascara, lipstick, eyeshadow and rouge. Certainly not ladies of the middle and upper classes.

Men did not walk about with 5 o’clock shadows and depending on the period in which the drama is set, wear beards, moustaches, or were even clean-shaven or had short hair. If you’re going to spend a fortune on buying the right sort of lace for a dress and get someone to use authentic patterns to cut it out and make it, then for heaven’s sake, why can’t you research hair styles, make up (or lack of it) and grooming?

As a writer, it’s important to try to get details right. I’m one of those readers who visualise everything I read, and I guess I’m not alone in that. The choice between over-explaining, and leaving the reader to their own devices is a difficulty I’m not quite sure yet I’ve managed to solve myself. Sometimes the writer needs to assume the reader will just work it out, unless it’s a slang word particular to only your own culture. As a reader myself, I revel in the discovery of new words, and in the descriptions of everyday activities in other cultures that differ from my own.

Having good what we call “beta readers” is the writer’s greatest resource. A handy collection of friends or people one can call upon who are experts in the field one is writing about, even if the writer has some expertise in the subject/time/place themselves. I prevail upon people I know to give me general feedback on where I’ve gone wrong. This can sometimes be eye-opening. “Did I really get that important date wrong?” Of course, a great editor will pick up these things, but it’s good to smooth out the manuscript as much as possible before it gets to to that stage.

Thank heavens for the internet.