Backstory, Environment, and Skill Sets

It makes sense that a character-- particularly a relatively young one-- will have acquired a set of life skills which are relevant to their environment. This doesn't just mean the cool skills either. This also means that the character has had limitations imposed on their learning by the social, economic and environmental structures around them. A big offender for characters with improbable skill sets is psudo-medieval fantasy settings, though the problem crops up in to any setting with a huge range of social classes, or a multitude of cultures or environments.


Part of the problem may stem from the unvoiced assumption that everyone shares some common skill sets. In a culturally homogeneous and egalitarian setting, this may well be true (this may also be true of small casts-- presumably everyone on your elite space exploration team has taken a crash course on space suit survival skills). But in many settings, it doesn't make sense for characters to have a knowledge overlap. To use a modern example, a 16-year-old who grew up on a farm in upstate New York might know how to drive a tractor, while a 16-year-old from Manhattan might not even have a driver's license; inversely, the farmer might be overwhelmed by the complex public transit system which the city dweller has been navigating since childhood. And that gap is without throwing in the implications of factors like gender roles or social class.

Think about what skills would have been essential to your characters, and what learning opportunities may not have been available, in the context of your world (or, as Limyaal put it, 'why would a wise old mentor just wander into town and teach a random peasant?').

If your character absolutely must have a skill that doesn't obviously come out of their background, you need to do one heck of a job explaining it if you're going to hang on to the reader's willing suspension of disbelief. Now, these do crop up naturally in particular settings (next Monday's post will address the phenomenon) but even then, there has to be an established context.