Errata

Not so very long ago, my editor's assistant called with a question from the copyeditor. In The Orchid Affair, my modern character, Eloise, makes a joke to her boyfriend about "Sit, Boo Boo, sit! Good dog." Did I mean "sit, Ubu, sit"? Or was it something else entirely?

Well, it was and it wasn't. It was really a reference to that old tv bit, "Sit, Ubu, sit" (does anyone else remember this?), but Eloise, being Eloise, had misheard it and thought it was Boo Boo, because that's the sort of thing Eloise does. It's a good thing she has lots of reference works in her professional career as a historian, because in daily life, she's constantly mis-hearing, mis-quoting, and mis-remembering. Not like I'm drawing this from personal experience or anything.

This little interchange did get me thinking, though. Is there a higher standard of accuracy for fiction? In our false world, must our facts be more true?

In real life, people get things wrong all the time-- or, at least, I do. As my Evidence prof in law school loved to point out, human perception is notoriously faulty. He had a favorite example he liked to call the Blue Bus Problem: in a community where the large number of buses are blue and a minority are yellow, if someone is hit by a bus, witnesses will likely claim the bus was blue, because they'll have expected it to be so, even if it wasn't. (Of course, I might be misremembering the Blue Bus Problem, which would just go to prove his point.) We see what we expect to see; we hear what we expect to hear. Memory garbles and hindsight corrupts.

My personal bugbear are song lyrics. In the past, I've come up with such classics as "You're my lover, not my Bible" instead of "you're my lover, not my rival" in Culture Club's Karma Chameleon; "You rocked me all night long" in place of "You shook me all night long"; and, one of my true triumphs, replacing OutKast's "Hey Ya!" with "Hang On". Hey, it made more sense that way. "Haaaang on!" Don't you agree? Naturally, I am always convinced that my version is correct-- until told otherwise while singing at the top of my lungs in a car or at a friend's wedding, just for maximum mockery potential.

On the other hand, in the fictional world, our characters are expected to get their details right. When they quote poetry, everything down to the last comma has to be completely correct, unless we tag it as "he misquoted". On one level, this bothers me. If we're trying to recreate the world, inaccuracy and misperception is a large part of that world. It also tells us a lot about characters' characters-- but only if the reader realizes it's deliberate. And there's the rub. If it looks like an authorial accident, you lose the reader's trust, throwing the reader out of the story. In fiction, that's Game Over.

There are ways around it; you can tag the misperception, have another character comment on it, or set up certain characters as unreliable from the word "Go" (Bertie Wooster, for instance, can misquote with impunity, as can my Turnip Fitzhugh). But, for the most part, it becomes safer, when the copyeditor calls, to say, "Okay, change it."

Would you change it? Or would you keep Boo Boo?