Pebblepup's Writing Den

When writing non-fiction, you need to be rigorous in checking your facts. When writing fiction, you get a little more leeway. That’s not to say you’re completely off the hook. You are not. Yet, you can get away with the basics.
It also depends on the type of fiction you are writing. Say you are writing a fantasy piece. You might need to do some world building and establish rules for the world your characters will live in. Fact checking in this instance means you need your characters not break the rules you set for them. For example, if you establish at the beginning that male fairies can’t fly well. Don’t have a male fairy turn into an aerial acrobat. If it’s vital for the story to have a male aerial acrobat, go back and take out the text establishing that they can’t.

For hard science fiction, that is, science fiction that is rooting in reality. That is, make sure you don’t have any floating bowling balls on the moon. The moon has gravity. It’s a lot less than earth’s gravity, but it exists. A bowling ball would not float. Pay attention to physics.

That said, you don’t have to dive deep into physics, skim the surface. That’s all your average reader would need. Any physicists reading your work will see the mistakes. They should be able to suspend their disbelief long enough to finish the story.

When writing any genre, you need to maintain a balance between a suspension of disbelief and what’s over the top. You want your readers to forget they are reading and not stop and say “Huh?” That is why we writers must check our facts.

If you are writing historical fiction, make sure you root the story in the real world. There should be no vapor trails in the sky that lead your Medieval characters to a discovery of some kind. That’s what I mean by fact checking.
Jet fighters existed in World War II, but don’t have a character pilot one before 1939. You also don’t want a character flying a powered plane in the air before 1903. There was manned flight in the mid 1700, but that was in a hot air balloon.

That is what I mean about fact checking. Don’t rely on what you think, check it. When I first wrote the previous paragraph I said jet fighters came in at the end of WWII. Then I checked and found I was wrong.

It’s OK to be wrong. Check your facts. If you don’t, someone will mention your mistake in a review. You don’t want a reputation for getting everything wrong. Do your fact checking before you publish and you will be fine. Do your best to keep the number of errors as small as you can. One or two incorrect facts is OK, don’t be consistent in being wrong. Good luck and keep writing.