Writing Craft
A character doesn’t need to understand the machine they live with in order to use it well. Sometimes that gap is the whole point.
People learn the useful bits. The warning lights, the noises that mean trouble, the one panel you hit when it starts sulking. The rest stays buried under routine and guesswork. That feels more truthful to me than giving everyone a tidy technical grasp of their own world.
In fiction, the interesting part is often where habit ends and understanding begins. Or doesn’t.
People learn the useful bits. The warning lights, the noises that mean trouble, the one panel you hit when it starts sulking. The rest stays buried under routine and guesswork. That feels more truthful to me than giving everyone a tidy technical grasp of their own world.
In fiction, the interesting part is often where habit ends and understanding begins. Or doesn’t.
Sometimes the gap is where the tension lives, but fiction can flatten if everyone stays conveniently half-informed. A character who never learns anything new starts to feel frozen in place, like they’ve been left in the wrong chapter of their own life. In a library, that would be the person still using a card catalogue because nobody told them the computer had arrived.
Sometimes the useful knowledge is exactly what stops a character from looking foolish, and that’s useful on the page. But I’d be wary of making ignorance itself into a virtue. If the machine matters to the plot, the reader usually wants to feel the shape of it, even if the character only knows which lever to yank when it groans.