How to Fact-Check Your Novel Before You Query
An agent reads your first pages looking for a reason to keep going. A detective reading Miranda rights in 1962 hands them a reason to stop. Here is the accuracy pass to run in the weeks before the query goes out.
Why the pass belongs here
Querying is the last point where an error costs you nothing to fix. Agents read quickly and in volume, and a sample that wobbles on a checkable detail gives a busy reader a polite way to pass. Later, the safety net is thinner than most writers assume. Trade publishers rarely pay for a full fact-check of a novel; a copyeditor will query what they happen to notice, and the rest goes to print under your name.
Timing matters as much as rigor. Run the pass after the structural revisions have settled, so you are not verifying scenes you will cut, and before the final proofread, because every correction writes a new sentence and new sentences need proofreading too. If you have not done a general accuracy pass before, start with how to fact-check your novel for the underlying method; this guide is about aiming it at a submission.
Check what the agent will read first
Submission guidelines vary, but most agents ask for some mix of a query letter, a synopsis, and the opening pages or chapters. Those are the pages that decide whether anyone reads the rest, so they get checked first and hardest:
- The query letter. If your pitch names a year, a place, an institution or a real event, it has to be right. An error here is the first thing the agent learns about you.
- The synopsis. Synopses compress, and compression is where dates and sequences go wrong. Check that the synopsis agrees with the book as well as with the world.
- The sample pages. Read them line by line for every real-world claim, however small. Opening chapters do heavy scene-setting, so they tend to carry more datable detail per page than anywhere else in the book.
A checklist by category
Then work through the whole manuscript, one category per read. Hunting a single kind of error at a time is slower than a general read and far more reliable, because you know exactly what you are looking for.
- Dates and calendars. Days of the week, holidays, school terms, moon phases, sunrise times. If your climax happens on Monday, July 4, 1976, a reader can look up that it fell on a Sunday. Check every stated date against a perpetual calendar, and check that elapsed time between scenes adds up.
- Places and travel. Street names, which side of the river a neighborhood sits on, and above all journey times. Can that drive be done in an afternoon, on the roads that existed then? Congress funded the Interstate system in 1956 and it took decades to build, so a 1950s road trip runs on very different roads from a modern one.
- Technology and products. When did the thing exist, and when did ordinary people have it? Netflix began streaming in 2007; the first iPhone went on sale that June. A character binge-watching on a phone in 2005 is an anachronism. For period work, the anachronisms guide goes deeper.
- Law and procedure. Arrests, trials, custody, inheritance, divorce. The Miranda warning dates from the Supreme Court's 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona, so it does not belong in a 1962 interrogation. Contemporary books are not exempt: much of this varies by state or country, so check the jurisdiction you chose.
- Medicine and the body. Treatments, recovery times, what a wound does and how fast. Penicillin was discovered in 1928 but was not in general use as a medicine until the 1940s, so a doctor reaching for it in 1935 is wrong by years. Readers who work in medicine notice, and they write reviews.
Keep a sources log
Every claim you verify gets a line in a simple log: the claim, where it appears (chapter and page), the source that settles it, the date you checked, and the outcome (confirmed, fixed, or deliberately bent). A spreadsheet is enough.
The log earns its keep three ways. It stops you re-checking the same fact on the next revision. It lets you answer a copyeditor's query in one line instead of an afternoon. And the "deliberately bent" column records the places where you chose story over strict accuracy, so the choice is on file as a decision rather than waiting to be found as a mistake. Tie each entry to your story bible where it touches a character or place, and the two records keep each other honest.
Using tools without handing over the pen
Tools can carry much of this load, as long as you keep them in the right role. A general-purpose chatbot answering from memory is the weakest choice: the same fuzzy sense of "that feels right for 1962" that let the error in will often wave it through. Worse, many writing tools are built to rewrite. Ask one to check a paragraph and it hands back a new paragraph, smoother and no longer yours.
Hold any tool to three tests. Does it show a source you can open and read? Does it return findings only, with no rewritten prose and no compliments? And does it tell you plainly when it found nothing? A flag without evidence is a rumor; treat it as one.
How Storskarvia fits the pass
Storskarvia's fact-checker was built for this job. It reads your draft, pulls out every checkable real-world claim, and verifies each one against retrieved evidence. Before a finding reaches you, a second reviewer whose only task is to refute it has to fail. What you get is a punch list with the quote, the problem and the source, ready to drop into your log, or one quiet line: "No issues found." Storskarvia never writes a word for you, so every fix stays in your voice.
Querying a period novel? Check your opening scene for anachronisms with the free checker: paste up to 1,500 words, no signup, and get cited findings back.
Once the facts hold, make sure the pages look the part with the manuscript format guide, then send it.