Actors work hard to remain in character for their films. Some, such as Daniel Day Lewis (above, in Gangs of New York) go so far as to stay in character even while not shooting, to maximize their approach to authenticity. As writers, we have to make sure the characters we are putting to the page remain just as true to who and what they are.

I’m in the car quite a lot and have developed a pretty voracious audiobook habit whilst driving. To improve my own writing, I go through 1-3 books a week at 1.5-2x speed to analyze every story I can cram into my ears. If you’re an audiobookphile and haven’t checked out the Libby app, I highly recommend it. Because it’s free. All you gotta do is connect it to your local library account, and you’ll potentially have access to thousands upon thousands of audiobooks, courtesy of your (already paid for via taxes) library. I can’t imagine my Amazon bill if I was paying Audible for all the audiobooks I go through in a year. Sheesh.

Anyhoo, I digress. I started a new audiobook today (from a bona fide publisher) and a couple hours in got smacked into the face with one of my worldbuilding pet peeves, a failure to keep a character in character. It’s something that many, many writers do without thinking, and (apparently) many professional editors miss during editing.

A character said something they shouldn’t have said.

I don’t mean the character misspoke, or accidentally revealed a secret, or anything like that. In this story, a YA sci-fi tale, the protagonist heard and felt an unfamiliar rumbling and compared it to thunder.

What’s the problem with that? Well, our hero lives in space, on space stations, and has her entire life. In this book’s fictional universe, the people do not have a terrestrial existence. I imagine it’s possible she would have learned of thunder through school or film or whatever. But would it be so ingrained into her speech patterns that she’d use it in a metaphor to describe that rumbling? Noooooooooooo.

Her life is spaceships and space stations. She lived among all manner of noisy, mechanical things. The rumbling could have sounded like an off-balance pressure regulator. Or a T34 Interlocking Phase Inhibitor. Or the ore tumblers at the refinery on Thrackas VII. We’re in space. She’s in space. Stay in space!

Am I being picky? Sure. I imagine plenty of readers would blow right past that and get on with the story. But not everyone. At 60+ audiobooks a year, I’m not exactly the most discriminating of consumers. But in almost every story I’ll hear a detail or two that just makes my inner worldbuilder sad. And this detail pulled me out of the story enough to want to write a blog post about it, so I imagine there are plenty of others out there whose Spidey-senses tingle every time they come across a mistake like this.

I’ll give you a couple more examples.

I did a deep-dive developmental edit for an epic other-world fantasy story for a writer in New Zealand a while back. Ten percent of the way through the entertaining tale, we’re well into the worldbuilding of a chaste anti-magic brotherhood in pursuit of an unknown magic-user among them. Low tech. A castles, swords, carts, and horses affair. A brother hands the hero a plate of food to be delivered to the head of their order. In the first person narrative, the hero describes the plate as mostly vegetables, with the only protein being a wedge of cheese.

The problem there? The word ‘protein’ is something that didn’t come around until the mid 1800s. Over a millennium after the scientific development period of the story. Yes, the story was set in a world other than Earth, but there was absolutely nothing in the writing to indicate that science had developed any farther there than it had here for the level of technology at the time.

The levels of science and technology matter in your writing, even if you’re doing something with medieval knights and castles. Because your characters have to remain in character, in both deed and word. Your knight in shining armor can’t name his speedy horse ‘Turbo’ any more than he can drive a Corvette to save the princess or use a rocket launcher to defeat the dragon. Likewise, he also can’t consider cheese as a part of a group of protein-rich foods because he can’t know about such things. The science to understand what a protein is has yet to be invented.

Later on, still a young man, the hero says he “slept like a baby”. Perfectly normal phrase, one I’m sure we’ve all used at some time or another. Except given the existence the reader is presented with, the orphan hero would have had exactly zero interactions with a baby or parent-of-a-current-baby figure his entire life. He would not be comparing anything, even sleep, to that of a baby, because babies are just not on his mind. Sure, he knows what a baby is, but there are many better ways to skin this cat. I mean, skin a razor-clawed gnurffle.

Colloquial phrases like these are opportunities to instead add depth to the world building. He slept like Old Man Shaw’s toothless guard dog Fezz. He slept like he had eaten three helpings of Father Dooba’s delicious autumn pheasant stew. He slept like he had bathed in the vat of Healer Burdock’s numbing balm she keeps locked in her secret pantry. Pick something in-world, to keep your reader in-world.

In short, we’re building entire worlds here, people. Don’t lean too much on ours, intentionally or otherwise, lest your characters briefly leap out of their boots into a different time or place!

Vigilance and creativity, my friends. M