Nothing is the same everywhere

This morning, I woke up to a good 3” or more of wet snow in my driveway. I shrugged and gave myself an extra ten minutes to get to they gym for my workout. I didn’t bother to shovel; I just backed out onto the street (which hadn’t been plowed yet, but was already fairly packed down from the early commuters). The freeway was a bit slow, but the traffic had cleared most of the snow from the main lanes even in the sections that hadn’t been plowed yet, but it was no big deal.

One of my younger sisters lives in Alabama. Half an inch of snow shuts the whole place down for at least a day, and we tease her about breaking out her winter coat when the temperature drops below 50F. I don’t bother with the winter jacket until it’s below freezing, and the heavy-duty winter clothes don’t come out unless it’s zero degrees Fahrenheit or below. And when it gets up to 50F in the spring, half the people here break out their shorts.

Snow is snow wherever it happens, and 50F is 50F, but the way people react is different depending on what they’re used to, and on what they expect. For most people, forgetting this is a minor inconvenience at worst, but for writers it’s a particular hazard of the trade. Even writers who are writing autobiographical novels set in a close approximation of their home town are going to have at least a few characters who don’t think or react they way they do (unless the town hasn’t had anyone new move in in three generations and/or is populated by clones).

Most SF writers are familiar with the problem known as “It was raining on Mungo that morning” – if you truly intend to have an entire planet where morning arrives everywhere at once and the weather is the same whether you’re at the North Pole or the equator, you’re going to have to do a lot of very fancy justification. What I’m describing above is the second stage of that problem: people who’ve grown up in one kind of environment reacting the same as people who’ve grown up in a different one.

It’s not just about weather, either. Some of the early settlers on the Great Plains couldn’t handle the endless, treeless grass and open sky, and returned to the hills and woods of the Eastern U.S. People who’ve grown up on the plains get excited about seeing the ocean or the mountains for the first time. My cousins from Alaska visited one summer and were wildly excited to see 4^th of July fireworks for the first time in their lives – where they live, nobody does fireworks on July 4 because the sun doesn’t set until 11:30 p.m. that day. When I was growing up, my Uncle Joe was constantly teased within the family about his inability to find his way home; he joked that he was born in 1910 and learned to drive with a horse and buggy, and he didn’t see why the car shouldn’t know the way home as well as the horse did. His great-grandchildren don’t understand this family anecdote, because they’ve grown up with cars that have GPS.

Writers have a double problem in this regard: first, if they want their cast of characters to be realistic, they have to pay extra attention to the things they take for granted, from weather and landscape to amenities like cell phones and GPS, and consider which of their characters might find those things new and strange (or might take for granted something that all the rest of the characters find new and strange). Second, the writer has to keep in mind that their readers are equally diverse, and will agree and disagree with the natural reactions of different characters.

The writer has to walk a fine line between providing enough information and providing too much. Jennifer freaks out when she goes for a walk outside her hotel – is it enough to describe her turning pale and rushing back inside, or will readers assume she’s agoraphobic without a longer explanation about her background growing up in the controlled environment of a space station that has no dirt, bugs, rain, or unfiltered air? Will the longer explanation slow the story down, or can it be conveyed in hints slowly over the course of the story?

Then there are the things that “everybody knows” … many of which have changed multiple times over the centuries, whether we’re talking about skills like napping flint and starting a fire without matches, or whether we’re talking about cultural attitudes about eating with one’s fingers or what the standards are for “good-looking.” Writers need to be aware of the reasonable differences that their characters could and should have, and they also need to be aware of how many of those differences need to be pointed out to their readers and given reasons for. Including, quite often, some of the things that the writer thinks are normal and obvious.