Part of what a character needs to know is how to put his hand to the right tool for whatever job he’s working on in his (fictional) life, from surviving childhood to courtship to career to leader to villain to… whatever you come up with — all the contingencies of life and the tools needed to navigate it.
Well, sure. And we need to do the research necessary to identify what tool we’re talking about for what situation. That’s where the author’s personal inadequacies or inexperience can be a challenge.
Example? Let me adduce one of Andrew Wareham’s career novel series (I’ll use the The Agricultural Lord Palfrey). The blurb for book 1 says it all:
“Captain Nathaniel Perry has survived the Battle of Waterloo with some slight distinction, and finds himself respected in his fashionable mess on the regiment’s return to England. That is a problem, for he has no private income. He had managed well enough on his pay on campaign, but could not do so in the Peace.
Simultaneously with his promotion to major in acknowledgement of his actions at the Battle, he is called to London at the behest of a dying grandfather, a merchant who had disowned him, disapproving of his mother’s marriage. Perry discovers he is the sole surviving heir… and rich.
Selling out of the Army and settling in London, he is soon noticed and his name remarked upon. He is then discovered by the paternal side, who do not dislike his money, but had disowned his father upon his unfortunate marriage.
Belonging neither to one class or the other, Nathaniel has to make a new life for himself.”
In brief, a professional (in military terms) must now learn how to be a member of a society with a status which is new to him, and to thrive in that environment. And over the course of several books (so far), he does. What does he need to learn?
- How to find lawyers and financial advisors
- How to investigate the worth of the estates he will inherit, and improve them
- How to make an appropriate marriage, ideally as part of the new family connections he’s making
- How to commercialize technical weapon improvements
- How to take his seat in Parliament and work with the appropriate politicians to the betterment of his situation.
- How to judge the various agricultural revolutions that are underway, and improve things on his own new neglected estates.
- How to make use of the special skills/histories of his various sketchy neighbors
Well, you get the idea. This author specializes in this sort of career novel, and does it very well. Me, on the other hand…
My series-in-process starts with a quite young man from the country, not long familiar with the city at the start. He has a home there, and he’s skilled in his technical areas (wizardry, history) but he’s gonna need a lot of work once he’s left without his initial support: lawyers, allies, sponsors, and so forth. Where does he find them? How does he know what to look for? How does he even know what he needs?
He can’t keep stumbling over helpful strangers, not realistically. It takes some real planning on my part to make appropriate persons provide the guidance or directions. (His banker can mention lawyers, the man who invests in him explains accountants, his butler can recommend valets, and so forth).
To make this seem realistic, I have to have a firm grasp of how the local civilization and society and government and economics work. I can’t just wing it, not and provide adequate verisimilitude. A long series really needs verisimilitude to carry along the illusion. (A shorter work can skim over a lot — the required details can just be assumed.)
On the other hand, doing the background work to provide the necessary also creates fruitful situations for plot developments, so I enjoy the challenge.
How do you bolster the environment for growth and change in your longer works where it may be needed?
Mad Genius Club 
3 responses to “How do advisors and institutions work?”
I’ve had characters take on more responsibility with their jobs or families. From reserve sheriff’s deputy (sheriff’s posse, in other words), to getting hired part-time just to teach in an area of specialty, to part-time-official-deputy, the character has to learn more, and deal with more parts of the job.
Or like yours, the character moves to a new place and needs a job. She finds a place of worship in her denomination, makes acquaintances there, finds a starter temporary job to pay bills, then moves along and gets a full time position, while becoming more active in local groups. That doesn’t always work, depending on the story genre and setting, and might even be counterproductive if the religious group is unpopular for some reason.
A woman I know wanted to sue a hospital. So she called the lawyer who had done her will and asked for recommendations. References are a very common way to find new advisors.
One book that does pretty well at this is Heyer’s A Civil Contract. The hero has lots of contacts in in his own class and among his military friends, but it’s his ex-future father-in-law (if you know, you know), who points him in the direction of Mr. Chawleigh, and I think later in the book the hero finagles an introduction to a historical figure, a member of the gentry experimenting with better ways to farm. I think through his man of business. Sometimes the relationship side of the connection is important, like Mr. Chawleigh becoming the hero’s actual father-in-law, the hero’s sister’s BFF and one of the novel’s main sources of both conflict and comic relief. In which case it’s justified to show a lot of the mechanics of how the connection is forged like the hero being referred to Chawleigh, all the waffling around leading up to the hero marrying Chawleigh’s daughter, etc. Sometimes the details of the connection are not that important: the logistics of the hero getting an introduction to Experimental Farmer Guy is I think maybe a paragraph of summary, and his meeting with Experimental Farm Guy is IIRC another couple of paragraphs of summary with a bit of dialogue interspersed. What’s important about connecting with Experimental Farm Guy is the hero getting information he can use on his own estate, and him trying to apply some of that information is more of a background thing than the main plot of the story.