Non-adventures in non-fiction By Steve Way

 

Do you remember the adverts for Horlicks the night-time drink that claimed to help you to get to sleep more easily? The strapline was ‘no one knows all the secrets of sleep but Horlicks knows more than most’. Frankly, I used to think that the majority of my Biology lecturers at university knew far more secrets than Horlicks. Regularly they induced a form of tiredness that was basically painful. Partly it was because I didn’t want to collapse into a stupor in public and was trying to prop up my head with my arms and was having to really concentrate on not letting my head slip onto the bench in front of me. The only time I experienced the same painful exhaustion was when having to sit through the lessons given by the science lecturer at teacher training college.

The reason these lecturers induced such debilitating exhaustion was because they made the subject they were teaching so astonishingly boring. When I went to university, having been blessed more than I’d realised at the time with great teachers while I was doing my A levels, I couldn’t have been more enthusiastic to learn. By the time I’d dragged myself through the uninspired degree course we were made to endure for three years I loathed the subject for ages – and the aforementioned lecturer at college didn’t help.

It was only when I began teaching science – and then eventually writing about it in fictional and non-fiction form – that I realised and remembered how fascinating it could be. I’ve seen since that virtually any subject can be taught – or written about – in a way the squeezes out every last drop of interest in it… or in a way that inspires and fascinates.

I’d gone to university wanting to be a writer but thought it would be a good idea to get a degree in a ‘serious’ subject as an insurance – it had never occurred to me that I could write about science, particularly after the subject had been transformed into a mind-numbing form of torture. However after writing a mathematical story for a project at teacher training college (it only received an average mark because ‘it was too original’) it slowly dawned on me that I could find creative ways of making the various dimensions of science stimulating and interesting for children.

Having written fictional stories incorporating science I was invited by a publisher to work on a series of non-fiction science books for children – and learned a sobering lesson about the veracity, or otherwise, of the non-fiction that was being produced at the time. The publisher gave me a sample copy from a previous series that they’d produced. Now I can’t remember the exact details but it was a book about scientific inventions. Early in the book there was a brief piece about an invention – let’s say a typewriter. On the facing page was a photograph under which was stated, ‘this is a picture of a typewriter’ despite the fact that the object depicted was plainly not in the least like a typewriter. Towards the end of the book, which wasn’t that long in the first place, there was a piece about another invention – let’s say a radio receiver. On the facing page was exactly the same photograph as that shown earlier, except that underneath it was stated that, ‘this is a picture of a radio receiver’. You may not be surprised to learn that the object also looked nothing like a radio receiver.

I pointed out this anomaly to the publisher. Her reply was, ‘well we’ve sold 10,000 copies.’ That’s alright then. Although I took on the project for the new series, I assiduously checked every draft in the process – including the photographs! I was briefly cursed by the Gods of Inaccurate Non-fiction when the series was taken on by an American publisher. One of the books had been about space and I had written explaining that, ‘Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars [are solid planets and Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune] are gas planets.’ Due to a whole line being missed out, the section between the bracket marks was missing. To be fair to the publisher they corrected the error soon after I’d sent them a strongly worded email. Perhaps the British publisher wouldn’t have been concerned so long as at least 10,000 copies of the book were sold…

Despite the proof-readers of the book not necessarily being trained in science it still astonishes me that no one noticed the error until I did.

I hadn’t originally realised how interesting it would be to write non-fiction, since I enjoy writing fiction so much, but I soon came to realise that there is always a story and the fascination is in finding a way to tell the story in an interesting way. Naturally a basic lesson is to check the veracity of the sources you use. One piece I worked on was on the first balloon flight of the Montgolfier brothers in which three animals were taken up into the air. Two out of three of the animals cited in Encyclopedia Britanica were different to those from a well-known public encyclopedia at that time. (To be fair that appears to have since been corrected.)

Citing this anomaly reminds me of a biography of JK Rowling that my mother-in-law kindly bought me for Christmas, knowing I’d enjoyed the Harry Potter stories. The American ‘author’ had clearly used a range of popular websites to carry out his ‘research’. Perhaps knowing that a few English place names are hyphenated he clearly didn’t think it odd to keep mentioning that she was born in the county of South Glou-cestershire. Presumably in one of the sources he used the word Gloucestershire ran over the end of a line. The whole book was peppered throughout with errors like this. I still regret a) not throwing the book on the fire (unfortunately we didn’t have an open fire) and b) writing a letter to the publishers suggesting that they and the ‘author’ should be ashamed of themselves.

Perhaps if they sold more than 10 000 copies they felt absolved of all guilt.