I’m in the process of reading all (all) the various series/books written by Andrew Wareham. If you’re not familiar with him, I do recommend him highly for his many books. They cover primarily British protagonists in the circa-early industrial ages up to the early 1900s in a category I think of as “career novels”. That is to say, they follow the life stories, often thru generations, of people who have raised themselves from sometimes unlikely hardships of birth or accident. They focus on how people of native acumen can make progress in their lives by figuring out who to ask about how things work: politics, power, industry, crime, institutions like the military, and so forth, and then embracing/making their opportunities with intelligence and perseverance, as well as a certain degree of toughness and realism.

This is a type of historical story I’m very fond of, and Wareham is an incredibly prolific practitioner (I swear he must be an atelier), with several of his series not yet finished (I can only hope for more).

I mention this because I’ve noticed quite a lot about how Wareham approaches his characteristic introduction of new players within his tales, and I’ve learned to be on the lookout when he brings a new person to the reader’s attention, so that the reader wonders (being familiar with and thus on the lookout for this process) “What’s he going to do with this newly-introduced character? Who’s he going to be important to? Like an introduced billiard ball, how will all the other character relationships be changed?”

And then, having noticed this, I can’t help thinking about his techniques when it comes time to bring new players into my own tales, and wondering just how to hint to my own readers, as Wareham does to his, how to place the newcomers in their expectations and initial assumptions.

Do you have technical processes in your own writing that you’ve borrowed from some inspiration of your own? What have you learned, and from what exemplars?