Inspired by some posts in another thread... What are some things you thought you knew enough about to write compellingly and then found out you had wrong/incomplete? Some examples from that thread: The difference between service dogs/therapy dogs/comfort dogs; The effort required for black women's hair to be straightened (and maintained that way); The true meaning of "assault rifle" (or whether there even IS a true meaning)...
I guess to some extent I'm asking for mistakes you've made that other have corrected, since if you haven't made the mistake you don't have the false knowledge, and if you haven't been corrected you probably STILL have the false knowledge. ETA: Oops, sorry, that was meant to be an edit to the original, not a reply... but as it's here already, I'll leave it as is.
Omigod, that's easy. Horses. Bloody hell. I got so much wrong at first—including thinking that 'colt' and 'foal' were interchangeable terms! I still wake in a cold sweat wondering what ELSE I've got wrong about them. I have a whole bookshelf of horse books (nonfiction) now, and read them a lot. I watch horse videos. You can't write about the 19th century in the USA without dealing with horses—in the 19th century. And there is a whole NEW raft of information I'm busy learning about how horses were dealt with in cities back then—which I need for my next book. Major stuff.
Pregnancy. I thought women just, you know, got pregnant, their stomach got big, and nine months later they had a baby. No big deal. Fictional babies are cute, right? NOPE. Then two of my close female friends got pregnant. they told me literally every horrifying detail. Your feet swell with blood and fluid. Your back is in constant pain. You can't move, towards the end. Your stomach stretches so big it permanently scars. When that adorable little baby kicks inside your belly? It hurts. There's a parasite inside your body kicking you from the inside and you can't get it out. what the FUCK. And when it comes out it rips you open. Things tear, sensitive things that hurt. My friend was in labor for twenty-seven hours before they cut her stomach open and took the baby out. she was so badly drugged she couldn't feel her legs. why would anyone ever do that??? christ. what the hell. I'm never making a character pregnant again.
Good one - a lot of authors get horses wrong! (I get so tired of riders kicking their well-trained, sensitive horses into movement.) And a nice subtlety, there - I know a fair bit about modern horses and horsepeople, but if I were writing a historical novel (which I'm thinking about doing) I'd have to research how things were done back then. I could think I know something because it's true now, but maybe it wasn't true then. Yikes. Does it never end?!?
I didn't know any of that either until I got the gory details from my brother's spouse. She did say the second pregnancy wasn't so bad, though. I don't want kids, ever, unless it's my hubby who carries the baby.
Cars and guns. It seems like every guy was born knowing all about cars and guns, and I was born knowing nothing about them. I've learned some stuff about cars, but I still barely know which end of a gun to hold (the one without the hole, right?). I still don't know whether clips are parts of magazines or magazines are parts of clips. I don't know whether a thirty-ought-six is a bigger caliber than a 7.62mm. And is it rifled? Who knows? Anyway, I'm glad we're all moving to electric cars. I know more about electric motors and drives than I do about internal combustion engines. I can hardly wait until we have Star Trek-like phasors. I'll probably understand them better than I understand regular guns. (Besides, a device that uses an explosive charge to expel a little lump of lead? What a lame piece of technology that is. I mean, come on. Gun manufacturers have been resting on their laurels for centuries now. Time for those guys to wake up and come up with something new!)
Not gonna lie, but this was literally the experience that made me wish I were a man. I still look at men and sometimes think, "You don't know how lucky you are." Or look at girls and think, "Gosh I am so sorry you are the one who has to go through this if you have kids in the future." And my experience was a regular one without complications my labour was only 6 hours long, which is considered very quick for a first birth!
We have energy weapons now, but most of them are banned by the UN's convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. Predominantly it's Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons and Protocol on Incendiary Weapons. Somehow throwing massive amounts of electrons, photons, and charged plasma particles at people is not more humane than lobbing bits of poisonous metals at them at a thousand or so feet per second. ETA: Christmas. No one in my family does Christmas, but having lived around it for my entire life I thought I would have an idea of it's traditions. I do not. And frankly some of it is kind of disturbing. I wrote a short horror story after I found the Christmas Tale of St. Nicolas and the Pickle Barrel.
Just woke up from fainting in horror from the pregnancy stories. Thanks for the nightmares, guys. Well, I thought I knew how steam cars worked. Just a smaller version of a steam locomotive, right? Burn some coal and stuff, make the water turn to steam and the wheels move. No problem. Turns out you don't burn coal, you burn kerosene or/and gasoline in a sort of Bunsen Burner to heat the water. It takes about 20 minutes to start a steam car. No quick getaways there. No wonder they had chauffeurs back in the day. And there are tubes and valves and pumps and oils... I just wanted to cry. I had no idea the time it would take to wrap my head around it, and how fast that information spilled right out again. I watched Jay Lenos Garage so many times I had dreams about the man, and my steampunk story is probably so full of mistakes that it will never see the light of day. I think I'll pick Stone-punk next time.
I’m a white guy who’s been married to a black woman for a few years now and I still don’t understand this.
Not wanting to bring the thread down with seriousness but... when someone told me that in the US, during the Vietnam war, people called soldiers 'baby killers', I was beyond shocked. Still can't wrap my head around that. Yeah, these things don't get mentioned in history lessons in 'civilized' Europe
Like, you don't understand how long it takes her, or you don't understand why I think it takes a long time?
Less horrible, but when I went to university with a bunch of Americans (in Canada) I was kind of shocked that they all thought they'd won the War of 1812. In Canada we either say we won or it was a draw...
Yeah, of course not, that's why she said the second pregnancy was much easier... For example she wasn't in labor for three decades, screaming for euthanasia. Still, I don't like the odds!
@BayView & @newjerseyrunner I'm glad I'm not the only person who didn't know. I didn't realize that black people and white people had different hair texture until I was in my twenties.
Same here, but I also lived in a community where I can say with no hyperbole, that there were literally no black people.
Wow, me too. I lived in the Bible Belt growing up, and our town had a very public reputation for driving out black people. I'm young, mind you. This was only 5-10 years ago.
