Does a writer need to write historically and scientifically accurate material? Or is it more important that a writer be able to "sell" the stuff he makes up?

Some people have a problem with the Da Vinci code because it's historically inaccurate. We don't have the same problem with, say, the Alvin Maker series or with Pastwatch. One member postulated that in Pastwatch it was the obviously fictional elements that helped us swallow the "untrue history."

I wonder if the issue really isn't simply that Card is a better writer than Brown. We accept Card's history because he's better at creating it, better at investing his reader in it, in short, better at "selling it" to us than Brown is.

So, as writers, where do we fall?

I personally think you can create whatever alternate history you want, as long as you can sell it.

In an historical fantasy, see Harry Turtledove, the reader is willing to accept alternative history, because that's what it is.

The problem with the Da Vinci Code is that the reader is led to believe that it's historical.

However, some books like The DaVinci Code (from what has been described) purport to be based on actual, historical events. Therefore, some valid, real-world historical research is assumed by readers, even though the plot is fiction. I think that's where people get nervous...the blurring of fact in fiction is one thing, just plain getting it wrong is another.

For example, Chelsea Q. Yarbro writes a series about a vampire. Now, no one is confused about her character or his exploits being fictional. However, all of the stories are set during real, historical events throughout the ages...the Roman circuses, the seige of China by Genghis Khan, the Holocaust, etc. Her research into these events is meticulous and you can be confident that if she says X real-world event happened in Y year, it really did. It makes her stories richer and more believable, because the history really comes alive. Her settings would suffer if historical inaccuracies distracted the reader, and that seems to be the issue, at least for some, with books like The DaVinci Code.

So I'd recommend that if you're basing a piece of fiction in this world, your history needs to be accurate or the reader will not buy into the story. If you don't want to do the research, or want to alter events to fit your story, then make it obvious that your story is set in an alternate version of this world.

It's all about whether you can sell your readers on an idea. Personally, I love the 'alternate history' type of stories. But the best ones are the ones where the writer has meticulously researched the history, and found one or two weak spots in the account, where her characters can play.

Though I haven't read The DaVinci Code, it seems to me from what I'm hearing that the biggest problem with it is that the writer didn't even TRY to sell his idea. The fact is . . . the more inflammatory the idea is, the harder you have to work to make people buy into it. You start playing with the part of history involving Christ, you're gonna have a REALLY hard time selling it.

What I REALLY have a problem with writers who insist in forewords or other material, that their FICTIONAL work is in fact TRUE, or imply as much. I get the whole "blur the lines between reality and fantasy" thing, and it's interesting, but that's not the way to do it. I don't remember what movie I saw that had a graphic before the movie saying something to the effect of "this really happened." Then in the credits . . . there's the standard disclaimer that the characters are fictional and any resemblance to real persons is entirely coincidental.

Things like that tick me off. So badly, I don't even remember the movie. (Was it Fargo?)

But there's nothing inherently WRONG with being historically or scientifically inaccurate. You just have to work harder to sell your story if you're not. (In more than one sense.)

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Then in the credits . . . there's the standard disclaimer that the characters are fictional and any resemblance to real persons is entirely coincidental.

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I detest Fantasy where every time the hero needs to get out of a jam, there just happens to be a previously unmentioned type of spell or magical artifact that can turn the trick (pun intended). It's cheap and sleazy, and I find work like that not worth reading. Heresy alert, I don't like the Alvin maker series because it runs too close to that line for my comfort. I didn't much like the premise of Children of the Mind (taken from the Deus Ex Machina end of Xenocide) either, but after all that wasn't the focus of the story.

There is a difference between writing within the rules of your chosen milieu, and just making things up as you go along. If your chosen milieu is the the universe of Superman, then don't have him shoot blue beams out of his eyes or make him casually immune to kryptonite. If your fiction is set in our real history, then don't casually change known historical fact to "improve" your story.

Even if you set it in an alternate universe, everything different from our world should be clearly tracible to the major premise that makes your world alternate. In the Wild Cards universe, you can't just have the moon made of green cheese without explaining that it was turned into green cheese by a rampant supervillian. If you claim it always was green cheese, then you are departing from the premise of the milieu.

As per my example, it isn't really all that hard to tell the story you want to tell while keeping the rule of parsimony. When you ignore the rules of the milieu enough, there is eventually no story at all...the intelligent reader sees that no matter how you resolve the dramatic tension, it is going to be some lame Deus Ex Machina ending or other, unpredictable only because the audience doesn't know the name of the god that will descend to set everything straight. And the reason the audience doesn't know that is because when the god finally shows up, it is going to be for no apparent reason other than to end the story.

I felt that way while reading Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis. It's been a long time now, so I don't remember details, but while I was reading the story about the Hearts game in the dorm (I think it was the second one) there were certain themes and ideas I felt like he would pick up on page x, and run with for a few pages and drop.

I had a problem with this in Lost Boys, too. I felt like the supernatural ending came out of nowhere - despite the bug stuff.

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I felt like the supernatural ending came out of nowhere - despite the bug stuff.

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identical twins don't have identical DNA

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But this doesn't matter as most (all?) DNA fingerprinting techniques rely on splitting the DNA at points that match a certain sequence and comparing the lengths of the resulting DNA segments, so even people with almost completely different DNA could have indistinguishable DNA fingerprints.

If you're writing an alternate history, state something obvious very early on that sets off flashing lights to tell the reader "Hey, something's REALLY different about this!". That way they know you're not just screwing around with whatever historical fact you want as it suits your story--you're writing a story in, essentially, a different milieu.

It's about making sure the reader knows the rules of the world and then sticking to them. Not in all of the specifics, certainly--but you should establish the basics of where your world deviates from reality early on and take things from there.

For example, in a Fantasy story I'm working on, about half of the population is "gifted" and can see the "mind-glow", and the other half cannot. Those that are gifted are considered citizens. Those that are not are slaves. The reader realizes this within the first page, and they won't be surprised to find out later that the mind-glow can be used to effect others' minds (but no other aspect of the world), that the mind-glow springs up from sentient life, etc etc. I laid out the basics of the world, and I followed them.

You can sort of hide an underlying premise, as long as there are plenty of clues telling you that there is something hidden that cries out for discovery. Like the imaginary friends that play the impossible computer games in Lost Boys...you know that something out of the ordinary is going on. And the bug attacks, and the persecution, and the diagnosis of some kind of psychosis...it all tells you that there is something deeper. When the suprise ending comes, it makes sense out of everything that went before. It shows up as the missing piece that explains what has really been going on. But you knew it was something.

Like a murder mystery. When the killer is finally identified, that revelation has to explain everything about the crime that was previously baffling. If there is anything that isn't explained by saying the butler did it...then it wasn't the butler, was it? I remember that there was that movie, Clue, and they had several alternate endings. But only one of the endings explained everything, the other endings were just a stupid gimmick to get people to watch it more than once (genuinely stupid, the movie wasn't great to begin with, but that ploy turned it into a complete flop).

I bring up that particular movie for a reason. The alternate endings were simply unendurably stupid, not in and of themselves, but because they didn't make sense out of all the bizarre coincidences that occur during the movie. With the right ending, the whole movie makes sense, and is actually pretty funny. With the fake endings, the audience walked out feeling either cheated (if people figured out it was definitely a fake ending) or shortchanged (if they thought that all the endings were equally bad).