By Kevin Paul Tracy
This month’s post builds on the ideas in February’s post with thoughts on infusing fictional politics into your fiction. In that post I refer to the root of all politics, economics, and how ultimately it is commodities in high demand – oil, gold, the spice Melange – and the need to share them that lead to politics, both good and bad. In any society, or world, no commodity is in higher demand, especially for governments, than information. No government can operate long where it cannot gain access to information – information about everything from how their own commonwealth are doing to how other, outside commonwealths are faring. Not to put too fine a point on it, a government is always starved for information, and no matter how much information there is to be had, it is never enough for any government.
And so we enter the world of political intrigue, where those seeking to hold on to their power, or to gain more, seek to control the flow of information. They want it, and they want to control who else has it. To do so they often indulge in some rather unsavory practices, such as spying and theft to gain information, lying to mislead others about information (often called euphemistically “misinformation”) and even assassination to prevent information from being passed on to another. Information gained is then used in various ways to gain political advantage, from sabotage, to blackmail, to arms races, ad infinitum. We are entering a time in our own world where, due to social media and the Internet, information has suddenly become quite vulnerable to theft and exposure. There are those who believe if all information is available to everyone, even state secrets, then no one can hold power, and that is what they dearly long for – anarchy.
In your world-building, erecting a political infrastructure can give your stories pillars around which your plot can grow and intertwine. Deciding what information is critical to power in your world, and how that information is controlled and brokered, can be complex, but in the long-run very rewarding, enriching your fiction in ways you might never have imagined in the beginning.
One thing that pleases readers is to have information that the characters don’t. Having your characters act on incorrect information is a great way to build suspense. For example, the information that King Mark has is that the neighboring kingdom of Latland has rich deposits of sulfur and nitrates needed to make powder for cannons, but peaceful King Fred of Latland denies this. So King Mark allies with the openly ambitious King Barney of Simlor, his neighbor on the other side: he will cede a hundred square miles of his southernmost lands to King Barney in exchange for his help in invading Latland and taking the mines. The information that King Mark doesn’t have is that King Fred is not lying, Latland has minimal deposits of either commodity, if that. Unknown to King Mark is that the richest deposits of sulfur and nitrates are, in fact, in the very southernmost regions of his own lands that he is ceding to King Barney. So who do you suppose disseminated the misinformation that misled King Mark? Well, who has the most to gain from the situation? King, Barney, of course, right?
The key is that your story cannot be only about these political intrigues. If it is, it will ultimately lose the reader’s interest. Your stories must be about characters, people. These worlds we build are only a backdrop to the real stories, about how the characters interact and affect each other. For example, the above story isn’t really about King Marks being led into attacking his friend, King Fred, by the unscrupulous and greedy King Barney. It is about a young man, Mark, whom no one ever believed in, who inherited his kingdom by marriage and the untimely death of his father-in-law, and who is desperate to show his wife and everyone that he is fit to be king, that he can be a worthy husband, man, and leader after all.
As always, like character back-story, much of what you build may never actually reach the page, but it informs your story in subtle ways the readers can detect. The feeling that there is a living, breathing culture with a pulse behind and underneath everything that happens in your books is what can leave your readers feeling fulfilled and eager for the next volume, whether a series or stand-alone.
Check out Kevin’s latest releases, the wonderfully entertaining espionage thriller, Rogue Agenda, a startling and engrossing gothic thriller Bloodflow, and don’t miss Bloodtrail, the upcoming sequel to Bloodflow.
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