: Re: How can I write about historical realities that readers mistakenly believe are unrealistic? Readers have certain expectations about locations and time periods, things they "know". For example, people

@Alves689

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Just be accurate and write a GOOD STORY.
If your story is dry and uninteresting, no amount of research will save you. People don't buy stories for their accuracy; they buy them for entertainment.
That's why badly researched stories can still be extremely popular. The story is what counts for readers. However, that's no reason why you have to be inaccurate to sell well!

Your question reminds me an awful lot of the author's comments on the "Helljob Series," 15 stories about the most dangerous professions written in the 1930s and originally published in Argosy magazine.
To quote his comments in part, originally published to readers of the magazine in the "Argonotes" section (bolding added):

All along I’ve realized the score on this and so I have checked and rechecked the data contained in the stories and I think I’ve got an airtight answer for every possible squawk.
Something else has amused me considerably. Writers, treating the same subject time after time in fiction, gradually evolve a terminology and a pattern for certain types of stories as you well know. This creates an erroneous belief in readers that they are familiar with a certain subject through reading so much fiction dealing with it. I’ve had to shed a lot of that for the sake of accuracy and I’m very, very anxious to have my hand called on some of it.
Oil well stories, for instance, always seem to have a villain who in the height of hate, drops a wrench or something down a well to ruin it. Dropping things into the hole is common. In cable tool drilling, so many hours or days are regularly estimated in with the rest of the work for fishing. The tools fall in, wrenches drop, bits stick, cables break, and wells are never, never abandoned because of it, or is it considered at all serious.
...
The process of digging up data is interesting when I can get these gentlemen to give me a hand. The navy diver here is responsible for the data and authenticity of this story. Going down off the end of a dock didn’t give me such a good idea of what it was all about after all. Never got so scared before in all my life. Something ghastly about it. And the helmet is enough to deafen you and the cuffs were so tight my hands got blue.
But it was lots of fun!
When these stories start to come out and when the letters start to come in calling me seven different kinds of a liar (which they will), sit easy and grin and shoot them this way. There isn’t anything reasonable in the way of criticism I can’t answer anent* this collected data.
It was either bow to popular fallacy and avoid all technical descriptions, or ride roughshod, make sure I was right and damn the torpedoes. Making the latter choice, I’ve laid myself wide open several times to crank letters. So be it.
—L. Ron Hubbard, 1936

The last paragraph is particularly telling. Get your facts straight, be very certain you know what you're writing about, and then write your story.
Or just stick with the inaccurate beliefs all your readers are used to. It's up to you. But that's not nearly as fun.
*anent: concerning; about

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