How much technical detail should your protagonist’s skills get in your story? In this quick writing lesson, I break down how genre and reader expectations should guide how much expertise you reveal about your character — whether they’re a trained geologist, biologist, or a passionate rock-climbing hobbyist.
Hello, Jane Cleland here. The question is, my protagonist is a rock climber. How much technical information should I include? Well, that’s, I mean, it’s a great question and I want to expand the answer so that people whose protagonists are specialists in any endeavor can see how this relates to them as well. And that includes whether it’s an actual, I went to college and I have a degree in X, I’m a geologist or I’m a scientist in biology or whatever it may be, or whether it’s a hobby or leisure activity in which you are serious, spend time, and have acquired knowledge.
I would say the primary consideration is reader expectations, which gets us into a conversation about what genre you’re in. If you’re writing a story about surviving in the mountains, well, readers who read nonfiction-like survival stories are going to want a certain measure of expertise, a certain measure of technical information to be shared with them. We have to know how they got to the position they’re in where they got hurt or lost or disoriented or whatever it is that happened to them that put them in this survival situation. But they probably don’t want to know all of the nitty-gritty details. That would be for a technical manual or a how-to instruction guide or something of that nature.
Now contrast that with someone who writes cozy mysteries and perhaps the victim is a rock climber and we need to know that because that helps explain why his corpse was found at the bottom of a quarry. And maybe the detective would consult with an expert to see whether he had the right belaying equipment, whether the rope was frayed, whether the chisel was the standard chisel or something else. These all matter, but a casual mention can go very far when we are trying to showcase a level of understanding and certainly empathy, but we don’t need our readers to become experts themselves.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. What do you think about how much technical information is needed in whatever genre you’re working in? I know you can do it, make the right decision, and have a pretty exciting protagonist.
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