Yes, I think your article was misinterpreted, which is always annoying when it happens!
Possibly so. I don't feel like I did but if two people say so then I guess either I have misunderstood the book I am talking about or they have misunderstood me.
So the bit I said here was.
"I mentioned Sgt. Frosty Publications above and I do think David Flin’s upcoming book ‘The Nitpicker’s Guide to Ancient Warfare’ is interesting in this context cos it’s essentially saying ‘Hey a lot of mainstream fiction gets these details massively wrong, let’s do it better’ which is like you say part of the motive for this. Ultimately the Peter Jackson LOTR films, which David criticizes for their portrayal of warfare, are excellent and hugely popular for good reasons, an amateur writer is not going to be able to match that for spectacle or emotion. But we can be more authentic, it’s the one angle Hollywood has left for us, we can write for that audience who moan about the logistics of the siege of Minas Tirith."
Essentially plausibility is a way of finding a niche that allows to compete with fiction which is other wise impossible for amateurs to match because it is produced by professionals with a huge amount of time and money to devote to it. Hence the nitpickers guide.
Which opens with the questions does getting these details right matter? It opens in fact with the following page.
"They’re all nonsense, of course. Oh, they make for great cinema, but they bear no resemblance to how things were actually done.
Fiction books – and even books that claim to be historically accurate – are often no better. In The White Company, Conan Doyle has a longbow arrow punching straight through a shield at a range of 50 yards; the depiction of the Dothraki in Martin’s Game of Thrones; or depictions of a city under
siege, where there is no hinterland to the city, such as Peter Jackson’s depiction of Minas Tirith. Which leads one to the first question. Does it matter?
Is there a case that a work of fiction doesn’t need to be accurate? Aside from the fact that it’s no harder to get things right than it is to get them wrong, when you get it wrong, it’s hard to maintain internal consistency. As we will get to see throughout the course of this explanation, it’s no harder to get it right than it is to get it wrong.
And, of course, there will be readers who understand these things. Outrageous errors of the type mentioned above will demonstrate to those readers that the book probably isn’t worth bothering with.
These lead to a second question: Does it matter?
The military reflects the society from which it is drawn. I’ll be going into this in more detail in the book, but for now, it’s enough to know that it is the case. If things are to be internally consistent, one needs to have a basic idea of what the situation is.
Furthermore, knowing how the military is going to be structured will give us an idea how conflict with another military play out. Everything links together, and if you understand the links, it all makes sense. Or, if you rely on things like Game of Thrones, it doesn’t make sense.
This leads to a third question: Does it matter?
Quite honestly, getting things right, especially in alternate history where stuff is being changed, should be a goal in its own right. If people spot things that are obviously wrong, the willing suspension of disbelief will be lost. Plausibility is key, and if the reader sees a whole load of stuff they know is nonsense – arrows piercing plate armour at long range (thank you, Peter Jackson and Helm’s Deep), for example – they’ll not take the story seriously."
That bit twice uses Peter Jackson's films as examples of details being wrong and that the aim of the writer should be do better.
That is not to say that I think David was saying that Peter Jackson's films were bad, he doesn't. But that the weakness of them is they aren't historically accurate and that is a weakness we can not have.
Again, it's about finding the niche. The thing we can improve on. Because otherwise we are outgunned.
I apologise, if I have interpreted anything in a way that David didn't mean, but I am surprised to find that my summary of that book is not what was intended, because it seemed like I was just reading the text directly.
(Note: The text above isn't exactly the same in the published article on this blog, because I edited it for the blog. I didn't use that edited text because it felt unfair to do so given I changed the wording. Instead I used the words David sent directly to me.)