Technology shapes our lives perhaps more than any other force. Technology is what’s allowing you to hear this right now… unless you’re my neighbor who had a bunch of glass cups sitting near our shared wall that time I went to borrow some sugar. And even then, you could argue the glasses he uses to spy on me still counts as technology.
But what happens when that technology goes bad? What happens when that artificial intelligence makes our jobs obsolete? Or what happens when a government computer has an error that incorrectly labels you a sex offender, even though that other John Lazarus lives in the Denver area and John Lazarus isn’t even your real name and the swat team that comes after you doesn’t realize that authors often use pseudonyms?
Today’s video is the fifth installment in our six-part series about the main conflicts in fiction. So far we’ve looked at why self-loathing and fighting with service staff can be good for your writing, and why stranding your employees in the wilderness and sending threatening letters to city council members can backfire on you.
As I was saying, technology conflicts are relatable. Think of the last time your power went out. If it happens when my children are doing their visitation, not only do I dread having to entertain them and not screw up the pronunciation of their names, I also worry that the roving street gangs in my neighborhood will use this opportunity to break into my home and start looting.
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Tip One – Show the Pros and Cons of Your Technology
All technology exists for a good reason. Sometimes that’s a noble reason like curing polio or making the shareholders a lot of money. Sometimes it’s simple curiosity. But if your technology gone wrong seems only to exist to provide your characters with a challenge, the reader won’t buy it.
And our interactions with technology bring good and bad. I’ll never forget the first computer I ever had. It was a Hewlett Packard running Windows 95. It was the device on which I wrote my first published story and it was the device where I first met my first wife in an online chatroom. Well, not so much met as saw an advertisement for a strip club where I became her loyal patron.
But that same computer was also where I got catfished in AOL chatrooms by scammers looking for credit card numbers, and also by a group of local eighth graders who were just doing it for fun. Plus, that first published story actually lost me money and my first wife turned out to be a serial bigamist. So anyway, the cons should be pretty easy to think of.
Tip Two – Hold Up a Mirror to Society
Here’s a good writing prompt. Find a device in your house. And try to think about what it says about society. On my desk right now, I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones. That mostly says that people would rather live in their inner worlds that have to deal with the bullshit of strangers. It’s a symbol for how fragmented and isolated our society has become. I mean, nowadays, message boards and comment sections are just filled with bots who won’t even invite you to the forest behind the school to catfish you and then throw rocks and make rude comments about the dick picks you sent.
Sometimes you can start with a societal problem that persists today and then think of a technology that will highlight it. If you want to highlight societal problems with racism, how about your society has a machine that can tell if someone is black or not, and then forces them to get worse mortgages or something. If you want to highlight societal problems relating to income inequality, how about you write a story about an AI that distributes wealth evenly and the lazy lower classes get to sit on their ass and not even work for healthcare?
Tip Three – And Never Forget the Human Element
Like nature, technology on its own has no motive. What it can do in literature is highlight the underlying virtues and evils of our psyche. Without technology, my father would’ve just been a man who drank all the time and beat me a lot. But with technology, those “beatings” took on whole new psychological dimensions. For example, I remember one time he called me and disguised his voice using a voice modulator, and said kidnappers were holding him ransom. I pawned several of his things and brought the six thousand dollars to the dropoff only to find my father waiting in his Oldsmobile. He said it was a test and that he wanted to see if I would pawn my things or his to pay for the “ransom.” Since I had mostly pawned his possessions, he said I failed and also said he’d garnish my salary once I got a job in high school to pay him back. Anyway, try to think of ways people can use new technologies for the worse like this.
Yet your story can also be about how human virtue can overcome the dehumanizing effect of a technology. When a car breaks down in somewhere dangerous like the middle of a desert or a street in Louisiana, it’s often through the kindness of strangers that your characters make it out alive. Genetic engineering and cloning might seem to make the perfect humans, but your characters may realize there’s also grace in our flaws and in our ability to produce life through blasting raunchy rawdog loads.
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