Pelicans? Really?

Remember how we used to watch Northern Exposure just looking for the writers’ Alaska mistakes? Most of us have read a book or two where the author made some little mistake about Alaska that made us question the credibility, even in fiction.

Living in a relatively exotic place you find writers who attempt to capture it often make those little mistakes in detail that can ruin the whole work. Some we can excuse and move on, some we can’t. Often it would have taken a minute of research to get it right. One example that comes to mind was in a book I found and read on a boat one time. It was a mystery novel about Russians spying in the Bering Sea. It was a good story and I was enjoying it until a pelican landed on a fishing boat near the Aleutian Islands. Before I questioned it out loud, I did look up pelicans but my suspicions were correct. They are definitely a southern bird, or at least were before global warming. As far as I know none have ventured this far north so far. The problem was this book involved some rather sophisticated technology and I found after the pelican episode, I didn’t believe the author’s expertise with that subject either. It ruined what otherwise was a pretty good tale.

Maybe the most outrageous work about Alaska by a non-Alaskan was a short novel called Slade’s Glacier. In it, the author used every Alaska cliche known to man but only got about 200 pages out of all of them. The best was a guy in Juneau who found a mastodon that had melted out of a glacier and fed the meat to his sled dogs.

Alaskans see this a lot, but I am sure so do most people, especially those who live in exotic locations with unique geography, nature and people (is there a place on earth that doesn’t have those?).

What is all this about? It is about writing what you DON’T know. And, in it is what causes the admonition to write what you know. But it can be overcome. A couple of books by Outside writers who got it right: Sailor Song by Ken Kesey and Coming Into the Country by John McPhee. Kesey’s book is set in a town patterned after Cordova. As far as I know it did not do as well as his more famous works and he was criticized in Cordova for not including this or that, especially Native culture. He told them another bit of writing advice, a good novel is about people and can happen anywhere, he simply chose to set his there.

So, what do we take from this? It’s all right if you write what you don’t know, but do the research. Don’t put pelicans in the Aleutians and don’t put sled dogs in Juneau (although there may be a few. And that was about the least of the problems in Slade’s Glacier.).