The Importance of Good Research

A couple of nights ago The Other Half and I watched Olympus Has Fallen on Sky Store. The White House under attack, the President trapped in a bunker, and Gerard Butler doing his Gerard Butler thing; a good formula for en evening's entertainment.

However...

Rather than turning off my brain, enjoying the explosions and Gerard Butler's loveliness, I found myself raging at inaccuracies and giant, gaping plotholes. Since when does the secret service let foreign nationals into a crisis command centre, since when would they evacuate the White House and leave the President's son behind, since when would they evacuate the White House into the firing-line of an armed aircraft, since when did the US Air Force take so long to intercept a rogue aircraft that it was allowed to get over a population, never mind anywhere near the seat of US government, since when would the President and his family be driven by motorcade from Camp David in a blizzard? Are you kidding me? Even the most basic of research (even the most basic of logic) could have avoided such obvious errors and consequently kept my wrath in its box where it belongs.

This got me thinking: We're absorbing information all the time and it's so easy to find stuff online that an audience is potentially more informed than ever before. When writing non-fiction, they say you should do so for your lowest common denominator, in other words, your least informed viewer or reader. The opposite is perhaps true of fiction: Fact and accuracy will never annoy someone who doesn't know about the subject, but mistakes and errors are liable to annoy a person who knows a bit about it. This is a great demonstration of the importance of good research. Or at least, if research isn't possible, the application of logic. All fiction is essentially making it up as you go along, but to really engage your audience it has to make sense and it has to feel real.