#from the writers desk
Hey, to you sci-fi/fantasy writers out there (and maybe some others, but this is mainly for things that can’t really be researched irl), if you want to write a character who is a driven, passionate expert on something, don’t write about them rambling indifferently about some boring, mundane part of it. Give them a deep, intense hatred of some oddly specific wow-I-did-not-even-know-that-was-a-thing-and-it-would-have-never-occurred-to-me-that-it’s-a-bad-thing thing they’ll gladly rant about.
Write a dragon rider who really fucking hates it when a dragon is trained to bow while being reined. A space ship engineer who is pissed off when perfectly good antimatter ship has been adapted to run on neutral matter. A historian who is stillnot over the massive failures of a general who lost a specific battle 300 years before she was born.
The guy currently giving us a series of lectures on the restoration of historical buildings really, really hates polymer paint. At the artisan school our stained glass teacher really hated this one specific Belgian artist - we never really figured out what did that guy even do, but he’s been dead for over 200 years and our teacher was glad that at least he’s dead.
Experts don’t just knowthings you’ve never thought about. They’ve got strong opinions about it.
This is a great way to not only make your experts more realistic and give them personality and lively rivalries, but a good way to sneak some exposition in. It’s important for your readers to know how the fuel in your spaceship is refined but there’s no way to sneak it in without it sounding like a lecture? Give your fuel tech VERY STRONG OPINIONS on it and have a running gag where any time someone mentions fuel they immediately have to start trying to shut him up.
If you want realistic biologists, let them argue passionately about taxonomic classification. Biologists have OPINIONS about taxonomic classification and discovering alien life is guaranteed to bring even more opinions to the field so
Also, the more someone has expertise in a particular area, the more PAINFULLY they’re aware of all the slightly adjacent areas they don’t have expertise in and exactly who does.
I’m tired of fictional linguists who know all the things about all the languages, give me more linguists who are like “hmm, looks like Proto-Alpha-Centaurian, probably from the 28th century, which I don’t know anything about really, but I did meet this linguist who works on it back when I was a grad student and we get coffee every year at the galactic conference and you know I disagree with their entire theoretical approach but their data is very solid and they’re very supportive of their students, here’s their contact info, you can tell ‘em I sent ya.”
