You’re sayin’ your better than them? 
In research, yes. In writing, most likely not. Well-- it’s probably closer to definitely not.
Cool.
Patterson is a horrible writer, who seems to have never interacted with teenagers or young people on any level. I remember the first time I realized his hackyness, in The Midnight Club. He was talking about being at some dance club, and listening to the "hardcore, punk sounds of Husker Du and* the Blow Monkeys*.
?
The Blow Monkeys? The “Digging Your Scene” Blow Monkeys? The lead singer wore a freaking straw boater and played a ukelele! I hope Bob Mould read that book and got pissed off (not that Husker Du were wicked hardcore punk either, though.)
The scene in Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot” where the British officer relays the offer to free any slave willing to fight for the crown. One of the black guys says something like “We’re already free!”
Hmmm…so a white guy who owns land in South Carolina is surrounded by a bunch of black people who are his employees and not his slaves? It pulled me right out of the movie.
Marc
In Titantic where Rose flips off her finace’s valet. I know, I know, her relationship with Jack was supposed to be freeing her from the restrictions of her upper-class, uptight life, but give me a break! I’ll bet $10 a nice Edwardian girl wouldn’t have ever even seen that gesture, much less ever thought to do it!
Amen. I had the same reaction.
My choice is The Silence of the Lambs . It just seemed ridiculous and contrived to me that the FBI would send poor little Clarice, a rookie agent, in with Hannibal without any experienced backup, let alone without a whip and a chair. It pulled me out of the movie.
Anything I know is wrong will pull me out of a historical book or movie. For instance, Braveheart lost me when Isabella showed up. There was probably inaccurate stuff before that (I’ve heard complaints about the costuming and weapons), but I didn’t recognise these things as wrong, so they didn’t bother me. However, I knew that Isabella didn’t marry Edward II until after William Wallace (and Edward I, for that matter) were dead. So, pow! Yanked me right out of the movie. I attempted to yank everybody else in the room out of the movie with me by sharing this news with them, but they all shouted at me to shut up and go upstairs if I didn’t want to watch.
Another thing that will pull me out of a movie is a badly inaccurate military haircut, believe it or not. This used to be common in '70s TV – an actor with Seriously Brady Hair portraying a sailor or soldier in uniform. Yank! This is less common nowadays for guys, but you’ll still see the occasional woman in uniform with her hair way down below her collar. Yank!
Anachronistic clothes will also do it – I read a terrible book once (can’t remember the title or author) set in the 1920s. Couple of chapters in I found the heroine sunbathing. In a bikini. Yank!
For my dad, BTW, it’s cars. Me, I don’t know enough about old cars to notice when they’re wrong. But Dad is a motorhead, and sighting a 1940s automobile in a film supposedly set in the 1930s will pull him right out of the picture.
This one’s silly, but I’ve had it happen at least three times.
Romance novels with heros who fought in Vietnam.
It’s silly because it isn’t bad writing on the part of the author, or a mistake. It’s just that I have a hard time reading romance novels set “now”, give or take 20 years, with a hero who fought in Vietnam without feeling like the hero is too old to be attractive, to either me or the heroine. Even though at least one heroine was a decade or so older than I was at the time I was reading the novel (shortly after it was written–in that case). Vietnam was the war my daddy could have fought in and didn’t (he was lucky, he was never drafted). So me who fought in Vietnam are “old”.
It’s also silly because I can read actual historical novels or novels in which the hero is supposed to be significantly older than the heroine without problems.
But if the hero fought in Vietnam, he’s too old to be a hero in a romance novel and I have to check and recheck the original copyright date and the age he’s supposed to be (and the age she’s supposed to be), and I can’t enjoy the story.
He’s probably never heard hardcore punk. 
Husker Du was more poppish punk, post-punk.
I was thrown off when reading Arturo Perez-Reverte’s otherwise lovely The Club Dumas when it was mentioned that the main character’s ex-girlfriend had cried when Rutger Hauer’s character made his moving speech and then died… at the end of Blade Runner. :smack:
Eureka, I do that too with any novel that mentions a Vietnam war vet; I immediately start doing the mental calculations on age.
There is a Chinese writer of martial arts novels called Gu Long, who’s writings, although commercially successful, are popularly thought of as targeted at teenage girls. Me being, at the time, an afficiando of martial arts novel, decided to give one a try.
The very first page, I forget the exact details, compared to reaction of the hero to “a rattlesnake”.
If you are writing a story set in 11th Century China, kindly refrain from using terms such as “fast like a snake that exists only in North America”.
I tossed the book right away and now know better.
One can’t always protect their daughter from seeing the uncouth behavior of those of the servant class on the streets, dear.
Wikipedia thinks so too, sort of.
What is it really, then?
It’s an in-your-castle outhouse.
The fact that clothes were sometimes hung in them to rid them of moths and the like is probably what confused the author. I wish I could remember the book so I could point you to the specific passage, but she described her characters going in there for a secret meeting and sitting on the floor amidst the hanging gowns of Her Ladyship.
First of all, clothes weren’t stored on “hangers” the way we do today. Gowns weren’t all one piece, so you really couldn’t hang them like that. They were usually stored in a “clothes press”, which was really like a cabinet of shelves in which elements of the gowns were stored, folded.
An item might be hung in the garderobe to sort of “fumigate” it against insects. (And oh, how nice the lady must have smelt after that!) It wouldn’t however, be permenently stored in there. Not only would the clothes have interfered with the natural function of the place, but garderobes didn’t usually have glass windows. (Curtains were sometimes hung across to try to reduce wind and percitpitation from coming through the openings in the wall.) A lady’s gown could get really damaged by being left in there, and gowns were incredibly expensive.
Secondly, if you look at interior images of surviving gaderobes, you’ll see that there’s very little floor space. The characters would have had to be seated on the “throne” to fit.
That’s kind of what I figured it was. I remember a thorough and seemingly accurate description of them (and the hanging, de-mothed royal robes, and the suggestion of stinky smelly robes) in one of Terry Pratchett’s books — Lords and Ladies, perhaps?
Pratchett is a huge fan of Cecil Adams, so I more or less figured he’d want to be right.
The two things that really pulled me out of Braveheart were my then-boyfriend muttering “No kilts! They didn’t wear damn kilts!” and Isabella’s pink stretch velvet cotehardie.
I was under the impression that she was sent because they didn’t really expect her to find anything. Also, he was in a cage so she wasn’t in any real danger.
Marc
And I thought it was because he wouldn’t talk if she had anyone with her.
We can only take the suspension of disbelief so far… I thought we had an agreement!
Nope, it was established that they had tried to interview Hannibal in the past, though not in relation to the current Buffalo Bill case. Each attempt to interview him had failed and they sent Clarice on the off chance she might gain some insight but they didn’t expect anything. Heck, if she hadn’t gotten jizz thrown on her face she would have gotten nowhere. Hmmm…how many Hollywood actresses is that applicable to?
Marc