Writing Blog Number 2

20241207 Problems With Using Reality

Be Careful With Reality

On Discord, the channel moderator of one of the channels informed us that the other mod – the one we preferred, to be honest – had stepped down. On a different channel that a few of us are also members of, we discovered it was because he had left the Internet completely.
         Then we discovered it was not by choice.
         See, he wrote espionage thrillers with a lot of army and secret service characters. Self-published, but he was making a very healthy income, as well as running seminars and other things. Doing very well for himself.
         Well, it turns out that writing was the second career, as many writers are. His first career was in something involving the secret service in the US. And he still had friends there. And his stories were apparently very realistic. Too realistic. He may (and this is alleged) have put some information about operational procedures and equipment not readily available into his works. That is currently being investigated, I understand. If found out, I guess he will be punished and the books may be pulped. I have no idea; this is Internet scuttlebutt, but it does seem he went too far in his fiction writing.
         So, I think this is a warning to everyone – make sure what you include in a story that you have garnered from experts in the field or your own experience is actually allowed to be released to the public. Being in a work of fiction is no defence. Another story that came out years ago is that Tom Clancy was questioned because some of the details and operational specs of machinery and vessels in his books cut too close to the bone, and they wanted to know where he got his information. He managed to prove that he had made guesses based on publicly available documentation, but these things are out there, and writers need to beware.
         There is a difference between asking a police officer how they would go about finding if a hypothetical suspect is guilty and asking James Bond how he gets into a foreign country undetected.
         It’s in the writer’s best interest to make sure what they include is allowed.