Developing A Background
Originally published as a post on 8/11/10; slightly edited for updated information.
Our world is a complicated place; much of what happens around us is invisible. We often don’t think about where our clothes come from, or even the food on our plates; even less so the lives of the people selling the clothes or stocking the grocery shelves. For example:
A store that is staffed by a group of “rednecks”, in a small southern town that doesn’t have much outside traffic, is going to have an entirely different feel–and stock–than one opened by cosmopolitan New Yorkers just moved in to that same small town. There will be a clash between the “come-heres” and the “stay-heres”, proportionate to how much effort the newcomers make to assimilate into the local culture–because the locals won’t change themselves to suit the outsiders.
That’s a simple conflict on the surface. Now look a little deeper: why won’t the locals change? Well, they’ve been there for three hundred odd years, working the land, marrying into each other’s families, settling into their way of life. John Smith traces his ancestry back to Some Famous Guy from the Civil War; he routinely gets into fights with Bo Hampton, whose great grandmother helped the Underground Railroad. Harold Fisher’s family has been fishing the coast for years, specializing in catching and processing some fish or other, and they’re up in arms about the latest trawl netting regulations–so they’re looking for fights with anyone these days.
If the main income from this town is fishing, the whole tone of the place will not match that of a farming village. They’ll care about different things, serve different food, wear different clothes . . . but they’ll still react with hostility to “come-here” know-it-alls. Especially northern ones. Because south/north hostility is absolutely ingrained in this imaginary town of ours, and no matter how enlightened the New Yorkers might be, the rednecks ain’t listening.
Every town, every village, has something similar going on under the surface. One big town is bitter rivals with another big town, based on a long-standing conflict, whether that be who makes the best gumbo or who has the best football team. Smaller towns may have more localized conflict: generational family feuds and contested hunting grounds, for example. But there will be conflicts, and they will affect significant aspects of local life. Writers must keep in mind, though, that outsiders probably won’t see but a whisper of those conflicts unless something extremely odd happens to pull them into the middle of the fight.
For example, in my novel, “Secrets of the Sands,” two of the characters (Idisio and Cafad Scratha) walk into a small, insular village and find themselves tangled into a murder mystery. They’re convenient suspects, being outsiders, but they’re able to clear themselves relatively easily; not so much from proof of innocence, but because Cafad Scratha slips up and reveals his noble status. Nobody’s willing to press accusations at that point, because over the last few years, noble became synonymous with trouble in this particular village. Everyone just wants the two outsiders gone, and go they do, with no real comprehension of the mess they skirted.
I deliberately left that mystery hanging open; just like in real life, you don’t always get to know everything about what’s going on around you. But that relatively trivial matter is based on issues that started years ago (I’ll offer one hint: where do you think Azni gets most of her supplies? Think about that problem real carefully) and winds up having serious consequences in later books; different characters see various aspects of the problem, and only the reader serves as a common thread to put it all together.
It’s a fun and light-handed way to weave background information into a story; it does take a lot of development behind the scenes, though. And as I head into the final revisions for book 2 and the expansion-draft stage of book 3, I have a lot of supporting background to develop. So what I’m going to do is give my blog readers a backstage look at the process: as I work through each phase of R&D, I’ll create a fairly short entry about a given research topic and how that relates to my world. I won’t be offering spoilers, but the background information should be fun for serious readers, and will probably help inform guesses as to What Happens Next.
Editing note: Unfortunately, the original plan as explained above never really happened. As of this writing, book 2 is published (Guardians of the Desert), and books 3 and 4 are both in the publisher’s hands (Mercury Retrograde Press). I have been frantically trying to assemble notes and organize myself into offering something at least similar to this notion; it is still very much something I want to do. It’s also one of those totally dropped balls that I’m owning up to and trying to correct. Thanks for your patience and understanding…have some tea. 
