A joke among writers is that, if law enforcement officials were to check their Internet search history, they would be booked for suspicion of murder.

There’s truth to that. Writers create all sorts of scenarios in their stories, gruesome as well as delightful, and some things don’t lend themselves well to the old adage “write what you know”. So you don’t need to shoot people or ballistic gelatin to find out how bullet wounds work, nor do you need to slice people to know the difference between arterial and venous bleeding. Thank goodness, because I’m a rather peace-loving person. (Note: I have searched both of the mentioned topics.)

Most of my internet searches don’t appear so gruesome. Google maps has allowed me to map a cross-country trip from Pickle Lake, Ontario (yes, it exists) to Wilson Sink Reservoir, NV (yes, it too exists) and inspect the terrain around the latter for Whose Hearts are Mountains. I have examined rooms in the Grand Hotel in Mackinaw Island and boarded the Strena Spirit in Gdynia, Poland for Prodigies. 

Before the advent of the Internet, I would have had to do all of this research in libraries, by locating experts (without Googling them), or with hands on experience. I quit writing Whose Hearts are Mountains 30 plus years ago, because I couldn’t find good documentation on what a desert was like,. Now the Internet allows me to pick a spot of desert, find out what the flora and fauna are, figure out the temperatures at night in March, and investigate how one can raise food through greenhouses and dry land farming.

The important thing to note about getting details right is that, if the writer doesn’t get the details right, the readers will — and they will not let the writer live this down. “That’s not an AK-47, that’s an AR-15” is a common refrain of gun aficionados on the Internet, and each knowledge base has its experts and fans who will find the mistakes in the writer’s narrative. Usually, of course, by Googling.

So it’s best to Google first.