: Re: Aside from military, how do I write strategy in seemingly ordinary settings (something going on beneath the surface)? The question says it all, but the only results I'm getting are battlefield

@Gretchen741

Overt vs. Covert:
In the real world, people use strategy and manipulation all the time. I dare say it's so prevalent that we don't USE the word strategy to describe it. However, because it is SO common, it's really just talking about what is going on in the story. Strategy is almost everything.
What I think you might be after is how do we describe strategy in daily life, rather than battle(?). In a war, you see the outcome of a battle immediately. There are almost always clear winners and losers. Not so in life. It gets all messy when your 'enemy' is your friend, or your wife, or your co-workers. So almost all strategy in life is covert.
So writing about strategy IRL is more like a spy novel. While there may be an occasional fight, success is often predicated on the enemy never knowing you played them. Winning a screaming match with someone is rarely a win. If your kids know you tricked them into eating their veggies, they'll deliberately refuse next time. If you're cheating on your wife, you have to keep convincing her over and over that she's imagining things.
I find one of the best writing strategies for showing this is to allude to strategies, but never actually describe the real underlying events. A husband might tell his wife he tricked the kids into eating their veggies, but you need to be a very clever writer to actually accurately describe subtle manipulations. Agatha Christie is a particularly good example of another strategy: using authorities to tell you so-and-so brilliantly manipulated something while never actually telling you HOW the manipulation was done. A detective tells you Mrs. Marple is a brilliant insightful person with insight into the darkness of the human heart, so when she says someone is influencing a witness, you make the assumption she's right and your mind fills in the rest.
If you're extremely clever, you can go into great detail about how the strategies are set up and played out. I can think of several movies like Ocean's 11 where there's a big reveal and you see how the author set up the strategy. But if you like the character - based parts, or the devious strategy isn't the point of your story, then I'd rely on inference and subtle hints. Your reader will be able to feel your strategy moving in the background and cartoon in the parts you may not have the time or deviousness to come up with yourself.

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