So after skimming the Dear Author blog over the past few days, I’m wondering… how important is accuracy to you?

Historical inaccuracies, unless they are glaring, don’t bother me too much. Glaring inaccuracies, something that totally pulls me out of the moment and makes me go, HUH?, bother me.

I don’t read historicals often and while I enjoy history, I’m not a history buff, so small inaccuracies usually don’t register on my radar when I’m reading.

As a writer, with the few historicals I’ve done, I kept a lot of the ‘period’ aspects vague because you’re less likely to be wrong when you’re vague. I don’t want to get it wrong, but nor do I want to get lost in the research instead of the story.

But this doesn’t just happen with historical romances. I’ve read some books that had cops as the main characters, or lawyers, or teachers. Inaccurately portrayed careers are more likely to throw me than historical details. Things that would be improbable, if not impossible, within certain professions…. like oh…say, the fricking medical field… ahem.

Yes, there was something that set me off. Wasn’t a book, though, was a TV show.

Sigh.

Law and Order: SVU, I’m so disappointed in you. This is a show where the writers definitely have the financial resources to get it right. Get a medical consultant, for cripes sakes, when you’re using emergency medical personnel in the story line and make sure it actually is believable.

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If you’ve got an injured woman that needs an IV and medical personnel can’t ‘get’ to her physically to start the IV, I’m sorry… you’re not going to be able to talk somebody without medical experience through starting an IV and the non-medical person actually get it right… on the first try.

This scenario happened in SVU the other day and it drove to home to me one thing I didn’t think about when I was skimming the DA brouhaha. Inaccuracy isn’t one thing that will totally ruin a book, or a show, for me. After all, I kept watching right up through the preview for the next episode.

But… if the show hadn’t been a particularly engaging one, or one that I already enjoy, that inaccuracy…or maybe I should say improbability, would have been enough to make me change the channel.

Or if that was my first exposure to SVU, when the medic was talking Benson through starting the IV, I would have probably rolled my eyes, changed the channel and not made any attempt to watch it in the future.

As a nurse, I know that starting an IV isn’t as easy as feeling out the “biggest” vein. As a nurse, I know it’s unlikely that an inexperienced person would have managed that stick on the first try. As a nurse, I also know that medical personnel wouldn’t have let a ‘non medical’ person be the one to stabilize a person with possible spinal injuries unless there was nobody on the scene and the medical person was talking the non medical person through it via a phone call.

Now…hopefully *G* all the non medical personnel are still following me. That particular scene displayed a serious amount of improbable situations. It wasn’t believable… to me…because of my medical background.

This is where trying to get it right, or at least not make it glaringly wrong, is crucial to writing. By all means, I don’t think a person should spend so much time researching a period, a certain profession, until the story is lost within the research. At some point, you do need to just get on with writing the story.

But if a glaring inaccuracy happens, one that pulls a reader out of the moment, that’s going to fall back on the author/the writer.

It seems that most people don’t mind the ‘little’ things as long as they aren’t sprinkled liberally through out the book…and provided that the book is engaging. But if there’s a lot of errors, or if the book isn’t as appealing as the reader would like, those inaccuracies might be what makes the reader close the book without finishing.

So that’s my two cents on inaccuracies…how about you?