The Competence Gap: Let Characters Explain Badly What They Know Well

The key insight is that the curse of knowledge — the cognitive bias where experts forget what it's like not to know something — creates friction in every conversation between specialists and laypeople. Fiction that ignores this produces flat dialogue where every character becomes a perfect lecturer the moment the reader needs information.

Consider how Gabriel García Márquez handles this in 'Love in the Time of Cholera.' Dr. Juvenal Urbino is a brilliant physician, yet when he tries to articulate his emotional life, he reaches for clinical language that alienates his wife. His medical fluency becomes emotional incoherence. The gap between professional precision and personal clumsiness defines his character arc.

Or look at Ursula K. Le Guin's physicist Shevek in 'The Dispossessed.' Shevek understands temporal physics at a level no one around him matches, but when explaining his breakthrough, he keeps circling, rephrasing, growing frustrated with language itself. Le Guin lets his struggle with communication become the scene's emotional core.

Practical exercise: Take a scene where a knowledgeable character explains something. Write it as a clean explanation. Then rewrite with three constraints: the character must abandon at least one analogy mid-sentence, use one piece of jargon they fail to define, and end uncertain whether they were understood. The second version will almost always feel more alive.

This works across genres. In mystery, a forensic specialist who explains evidence badly creates productive confusion. In romance, a character who can't articulate why they love someone conveys deeper feeling than eloquence. In fantasy, a wizard who performs magic flawlessly but can't teach it creates both humor and stakes.