Facts and Figures

Okey-dokey,today, we take a look at Facts and Figures (development and support).

Now, facts and figures will mean different things in fiction than in non-fiction, so bear with me.

In non-fiction, facts and figures are the objective details you can bring in from reputable sources to support your premise (the basic idea of your scene/chapter). So, say you are pointing out to your readers the value of hiring an accountant to do their taxes. You might want to tell your readers how many people each year use tax accountants instead doing their own taxes. Has that number increased or decreased over the last decade? More importantly, is there a difference between the two groups in the amount of taxes paid (or refunded)? How about audits? Which group is more likely to be audited? Which group, once audited, is more likely to be fined for under-payment?

Where would you go to get that information? The IRS? Maybe they have a web page that would give you that information. Publications written for the accounting community? Accountants like reading about their infinitely fascinating field. Professional organizations? An accountant of your acquaintance? (The accountant might also be a great resource for humorous accounting anecdotes you can put in a sidebar to amuse your readers). How about just mentioning your own background and training. If, say, you happen to be an accountant, you can tell the reader how many hours of continuing education you have to do each year to keep your license.

Now you have given your reader concrete examples to demonstrate how they would benefit from hiring a tax accountant. Just as important, you have given the reader reasons to believe that you know what you are talking about. You are a trustworthy person who has done research and taken care to make sure your facts are correct.

Your mission today is to take your first topic from way back on Monday and write down...oh, say three to five questions you think your readers might have about that idea. Are they going to wonder how many different kinds of widgets an engineer can design in a week? Will they wonder why the heck they should listen to you--a perfect stranger (that's one of the first questions any reader asks, by the way)? Now take, say, the three questions you think are most important, and write down some places you might go to find CONCRETE ANSWERS to those questions. Books, articles, studies, professional organizations etc.

And now, You guessed it! Find the answers to those questions!

Now, Fictioneers! You've either been bored off your gourds for the last few minutes, or you have intelligently skipped down to this section and left the non-fiction type persons to their own devices.

Your job here is different (Contrast!). Your story needs facts and figures, too. These facts fall generally into two categories. Real-world facts and fiction-world facts. Let's start with the real-world facts. Say your story is set in...oh...Seattle. Real-world Seattle as opposed, for example, to a small part of Seattle that I made up for the purposes of a horror novel.

You are going to need some concrete information about Seattle including size, neighborhoods, streets, population, population distribution in terms of race, locations of important buildings and institutions, what the space-needle looks like and where it is located etc.

This is much easier if you have visited the city with a good map and guidebook. You will definitely need to get the FEEL of the city, the smell of the city at night, the temperature, the sound. If your character is going to be hanging around in the underground parts of Old Seattle, you will need to get that experience as well. Take a tour. Find a map of the underground. Read non-fiction accounts of Seattle history and present-day features. Or just live nearby for thirty years and visit it a lot. (Also Google. You can get a LOT of this information on Google)

On the other hand, you don't need to demonstrate your OWN knowledge of the city. You have to demonstrate YOUR CHARACTER's knowledge of the city. When he walks through the Pike Place Market, does he rap his knuckles on the back of the big bronze pig for luck? (I was pretty sure it was bronze, but I double-checked with a quick Google). Does he take a minute to watch the fish-mongers tossing salmon and steelhead back and forth to each other?

Or say your hero is a tax accountant and amateur sleuth. You don't have to add footnotes to prove you have researched accounting. Your hero talks knowledgeably about how line twelve on Schedule E proves that the murderer was... Or, if he is a world-renowned tax accountant, the dangerous blonde walks through his front door and says she has come to him because he won the Nobel Prize for Accounting, and she is desperate to find out what happened to her late husband's estate.


There are, on occasion, "facts" that you can make up. Save yourself some tedious research by planting your story in a fictional town, country or planet.

(PS, it's only tedious if you aren't INTERESTED in, say, Seattle or Minneapolis or fly fishing or accounting or whatever details your audience needs for a sense of reality in the story, and why on Earth are you writing about something that doesn't interest you?).

However, the readers will still be asking questions: What does this town smell, feel, look like? What exactly is involved in the hero's career as a norb-herder or cross-dimensional shuttle pilot? What plants grow in her garden? What is that weird-lookin' animal that almost ate her foot? How did the hero get here? In short, they will be asking all the some questions they would ask about real-world Seattle, it's just that you get to make up many of the answers.

So, your assignment for today is to look at the first scene you have written. What questions will your reader be asking about the character's knowledge and background, the reality and concreteness of the setting, whether the action is plausible? List at least three, or even better, five. What do you need to know in order to provide those answers?

Tomorrow, The first draft!