On Coconut Milk
I recently read Terry’s Pratchett’s YA novel NATION, which I highly recommend. It has heart and humor and a tropical island setting. However, early in the book, the main character finds a coconut and drinks the “milk.”
Hold the phone. You can’t do that.
Or can you? I put the book down and hit up Wikipedia, being too lazy to find my cookbook containing the coconut milk recipe. But I was right. You can drink coconut juice straight from the coconut, but you have to process the coconut to actually get milk out of the thing.
One word took me straight out of that story. And it’s quite a good story. That’s why writing seems harder than brain surgery sometimes. We have to know everything, even the things we don’t know that we don’t know. Thank heaven for great critique partners to help us find the coconut milk in our manuscripts.
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You are right in that with modern technology, we are able to grasp information so easily with a few clicks on the computer. Yet still, we need to check our sources and get feedback. That’s why I love MiG Writers!