Fake it 'til you make it

 This week I've been continuing to write my novella in answer to the Murderbot series of books.  There are a lot of differences between Murderbot and my character, one of the biggest being the tone of the character's thoughts.  Murderbot is often very cynical, and the picture of the universe which he paints is often quite dark.

Its world is one where corporations rule a large part of the galaxy, and everything has to make a profit.  Murderbot is a construct, half-human and half-robot, and if he gets too injured on a contract the company expects the clients who rented it to abandon it to die.

I didn't want that level of darkness in my books, but I did want to copy a lot of the short, snappy tone of the narrative.

There is a lot of technical detail about coding in the Murderbot books, and I expected the author Martha Wells to have a science background.  In fact she has a degree in anthropology, which got me thinking about how much technical knowledge I really needed to write my story.

Up to now I haven't needed to delve into too much technical detail because I've been able to give the really techy  stuff to a non-viewpoint character.  My main character is teamed up with a sentient spaceship, so I've been able to get him to do a lot of the technical things my character would otherwise have to do.  This works quite well in the fakery department.

Other details I've been able to invent simply by thinking them through.  It stands to reason that if you're wearing armour with a weapon in the middle of your forehead then you're not going to be able to rely on your eyes for accurate  targeting.  Your eyes are at the wrong level.  So how do you overcome that problem?  You get the character to use a head-up display in her visor for targeting. 

I have included a couple of killware attacks in the narrative, but I've kept the details brief, and I got the spaceship to deal with them so my main character doesn't need to know how to.

The other thing I did yesterday was write a space combat scene.  These are the things I'm weakest at, and it takes me ages to write them, working out painfully slowly what the next move is each time.  In the finished scene I've added details like my character being able to hear the thud of the wing guns being fired above her.  I don't know if she would be able to hear them in reality, or whether the ship would be so well insulated you wouldn't hear the noise.  But I think I can get away with it.

The key is to introduce these elements confidently, and set my rules for how things work.  I'm faking it 'til I make it, and so far it's working well.