What happens when your knowledge suddenly outpaces your story? This can be a bit of a problem if you’re doing research on a subject as you write about that subject, instead of doing all the research beforehand like they taught us in school. At least, I think they taught us that; I wasn’t really listening.

It makes sense, logically; learn about the subject, then write about the subject. Only research doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes, you get halfway through the story and find out that oops, your entire plot turns on a twist that wouldn’t exist in that time, place, or culture. Learning takes time, and if you learned everything about the subject before you picked up a pen or sat down at the computer, nobody would ever write anything. So you will have moments when you learn something that forces you to scrap a scene or that really awesome bit of dialogue, or at best, makes you sit down and poke at the scene to make the research fit the story.

I’ve been bitten by this phenomenon a few times. Once, in The Root of All Evil, when I simultaneously wanted a character to be in danger of being burned at the stake, only for her to eventually end up in Australia. Turns out, burning people at the stake was banned in Britain in 1790, but the first prisoners to land in Botany Bay only left Britain in 1788, and the colony wasn’t very well established for a few years afterward; certainly no one was volunteering to emigrate there for a while. So much for ‘regency’ romance.

What’s a writer to do? Skim over it and hope no one notices. I deliberately didn’t say when the story was set, or put in background- the French Revolution was kicking off about that time- that would give any but the most expert reader a sense that something was slightly off about the story. And to be just to both the readers and reality, those two bits of time-related information were only in conflict because I wanted them to be, not because the story required it.

My research recently outgunned a story in another way- a slightly disgusting way, so put down your drink or whatever you’re eating before you read on- when I accidentally learned that the first-aid procedures I was taught as a child have been replaced by new procedures and new tech. Specifically, I was taught to put surface pressure on a puncture wound, because there was a concern that packing the wound might push debris further in, or damage the already damaged tissue. Seems reasonable, but war is a great motivator in the field of medicine, and GWOT changed a few things. Tourniqueting is way more common now for bleeding limbs, and- relevant to my first-aid knowledge- puncture wounds are now packed with bandages that have been imbued with something called QuickClot. And the standard procedure, according the EMT who was relaying this information, is to, ‘pack the wound until they scream’- apparently, QuickClot produces a burning sensation. Not that having a plain bandage shoved into your bleeding wound tract sounds very comfortable, either.

This matters, because in one of my contemporary stories, I have a character bandaging up another character, who’s been stabbed in the upper left chest. The old procedure allowed for some fairly dark jokes about dying and coming back as a ghost; now I’m not sure there’d be space for anything but screaming and possibly slow, very controlled breathing, while trying hard not to scream. This isn’t a huge deal, but it means rewriting a scene and deciding how stoic a character can realistically be when another character is packing ‘burning’ material into a wound.

Basically, all this is to say, sometimes you’ll come across a fact that messes up your story. This can be more or less annoying, depending on how big the mess-up is, but don’t despair. Alter the story as you think you need to, and keep going. Sometimes you can’t wait to get all your ducks in a row; you’ve just got to grab whatever ducks are handy at the moment and make a dash for it.