Limitations in My Writing… with cartoons from The Far Side by Gary Larsen

May 10, 2026

Scientists… Pffft! Even when they get their desired results, they don’t foresee the consequences.

Sometimes I get ideas for stories that I know that I’m not capable of writing, so I don’t even make the attempt. My latest is a science fiction story set in the near future, but I don’t have a specific year in mind. It’s one of those “technology conquers or kills humanity stories,” but it’s not like a bunch of terminators murdering humans or computers making up their own rules and overruling the now helpless humans.

As I’ve frequently mentioned in the past, I have some limitations in my writing that would prevent me from doing a good job with a story like this. I’m not that good at writing descriptions, which would be important in setting up both the imagery and mood in the story. I’m especially weak with figurative language. I’m a very straightforward writer.

I also don’t know enough science lingo to make the story credible to its potential audience. Yeah, I could do some research, but I’d still probably mess up some stupid minor detail that I didn’t even think was important enough to check and end up ruining all suspension of disbelief from genre readers.

Gary Larsen doesn’t endorse my story idea. I just liked reading his Far Side comic strips back in the 1980s and 1990s newspapers.

The future in this story wouldn’t look much different than what things look like now, and that takes care of a problem that some old science fiction stories have where the author envisions a specific visual setting for a specific date, and then we reach that specific date in real life and things don’t look anything like what the science fiction author described. Even the first Terminator movie said Skynet took over in 1997. I was alive in 1997, and 1997 was nothing like that.

Terminator? 2001: A Space Odyssey? The writers got those years completely wrong! What a bunch of hacks!! I don’t want to get burned by choosing the wrong year. To counter this, my story takes place in an unspecified time, and the future will look a lot like today but with a few dystopian differences.

Since my interests aren’t science oriented, I’d have to focus more on the social structure elements, setting it in a future where AI/technology is running everything (that’s not going to be shocking to any sci-fi readers). At first, everything seems great because everybody gets a universal living income promised by the corporate visionaries, and most people have easy lives at first.

I think this is now referred to as ‘Saying the quiet part out loud.’

You how it is with visionaries, though; they might have cool ideas, but somebody (sometimes it’s the visionaries themselves) always ruins the cool idea with greed and shortsightedness. With a cashless social credit system, corporations start controlling the money flow, the information, and even the news/history that people think they know. Most people aren’t even aware of how everything is being controlled, so this life is okay with some people, but for others, a very few others, who think they understand what’s going on, well… they can’t do much about it.

This would be typical sci-fi in that it plays with people’s fears of the future. Most people my age are suspicious of technology moving too quickly, and a lot of us are wary of stuff like A.I. (when we’re not falling for the fake pictures and videos). Plus, we really like water. Whether the stories are true or not (they probably are), people are concerned about water shortages and data centers that (allegedly) make those shortages worse. It just makes sense then to play up to those and other fears about corporations and A.I. in my story (that I’ll probably never write).

Texas after data centers are done with it. To be fair, a lot of Texas is like this already.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, my story sounds like nothing new. A lot of sci-fi stories have this basic premise, but most stories like this are action oriented, with some heroic figures battling robots or computer generated threats. Not this story. Lack of action is the downfall of many stories, so I’ll need to replace robot battles and explosions with sexual tension, humor, banter, and a good bar fight. That’s a combination that I can handle.

The two protagonists, a historian with forbidden information and a rebel who lives outside the social credit system, are opposite genders with opposing viewpoints about what to do about the corporate system. Of course, they become attracted to each other because of the intensity of their shared conflicts. Of course.

I guess nowadays they don’t have to be opposite genders. They could be same gender or even cross species, and nobody would even bat an eye when the sexual tensions rise. If anything, readers might roll their eyes as things progress. Yawn! This again?

If we don’t conduct these experiments, our competitors/enemies will!

If I really wanted to get readers’ attention, I could write a controversial multi-character ‘scene’ (you know what I’m talking about) that crosses genders and species and aliens. I could do it. I could write that. And I could actually make it good, maybe even great! But it’s not my thing. It’s not how I choose to roll. That’s one reason that I’m a literary nobody. That and my skills are limited.

Setting up that weird scene might be difficult anyway because in this future that kind of activity is rare: men and women generally don’t like each other (most of that due to corporate manipulation that intentionally pits every demographic against each other in order to make individuals less independent and more vulnerable against abusive corporate practices). However, the two protagonists work really well together in a couple high-stress situations, and we know what happens then, especially if both the male and the female are physically attractive, which they would be because I’d write them like that.

This punishment actually works with some students but not with the ones who think they’re smarter than God,

Next, I’d need some kind of bar fight. Bar fights aren’t mandatory, but they can be iconic. The cantina scene from Star Wars? Everybody remembers that, and the moments of violence didn’t even last long, but it revealed character. And there was some humor involved. And to me, the original movie will always just be just Star Wars.

A story like this needs humor too, so along with the banter I’ll throw in throw in the crazy conspiracy theorist because, you know, they can come across as kind of funny and crazy at the same time (you gotta believe me, man!). Conspiracy theorists are often right that the story being fed to the public is wrong, but then they get bogged down trying to figure out what actually happened.

Three weeks later, the corporation promoted this concoction as their new ‘health beverage.’

Unfortunately, since most theorists don’t have access to enough information to correctly put the pieces of the puzzles together correctly, they end up committed to theories that are wrong and/or spectacularly stupid and therefore ruin their credibility completely, and everybody else feels even more strongly that the original big lies are true. And then their commitments to bad ideas comes across as funny to everybody else. That’s how it works, man!

In this case, the conspiracy theorist will be something artificially generated, like a talking cat or dog or weird looking alien type creature. The reader knows (or suspects) that the dog/cat/alien is fake because … duh… that’s what A.I. does (especially in the future, though a science nerd might have a better technical term for this). But the two protagonists are in some ways just as brain rotted from the environment that even they can be fooled and not suspect it.

We don’t find out if the crazy conspiracy theorist is helping or leading them to their doom at the behest of its creators until the end of the story (and even I’m not sure yet), but it will be hilarious with its commentary along the way. And then working the techno-alien conspiracy theorist into the… uh.. weird scene… THAT would be a lot of fun! I could write all that!

As I mentioned earlier, the two protagonists have conflicting goals. The historian wants to destroy the system. The rebel doesn’t like the system but doesn’t want it to just go away without a replacement system ready. As they rant to each other about their viewpoints, the historian argues that the system is evil and needs to be crushed at all costs while the outsider counters that masses of people would starve or be killed in the ensuing chaos if the system were to just vanish. The historian declares that no such system could be established without the current system gone first, and blah, blah, blah, the sexual tension rises…

Even though banter, bar fights, humor, and semi-adult content can cover up a lot of weak points in my writing, it might not make up for my gaps, which is why I probably won’t try writing something like this. Then again, trying it while relying heavily on my strengths and disregarding my weaknesses might be really fun to write. And if I went all-out on it, it might be really fun to read!

I’m not looking for validation about this. I’m just explaining my thoughts about writing.

The ‘dog’ has already transferred their formulas to A.I., and they don’t know it.

How would all this end? Would the historian use her knowledge to destroy the system? Would the rebel succeed at preserving the system and helping people thrive within it? Or would they be led to their own doom by the techno-alien conspiracy theorist?

We’ll probably never know. These are just ideas, and some of these go beyond my limitations. For all I know, it’s already been written, but if it has, I bet it doesn’t have a weird sex scene in it. And if it does, I bet I could write a better one. But that’s just not the way I roll.

*****

I admire cartoonist Gary Larsen because he didn’t let his self-admitted artistic limitations prevent him from becoming one of the most successful comic strip artists of my generation. He found a way to make the combination of his strengths and limitations work. And then he retired when he wanted to. Great job, Gary!

*****

When I wrote my ONE novel, I stuck to my strengths and subjects that I knew about!

It’s the oldest story in the world, 1990s style!

Man meets woman; man falls in “luuuvvv” with woman; man gets blindsided by reality!