Post History

One of the most important aspects of writing both fiction and non-fiction is managing the reader's attention. Parts of a scene are for atmosphere. They are meant to flesh out the setting so that it feels real and engages the sense in the moment. They are not meant to be remembered, only to color the experience of the moment. Some parts of a scene, on the other hand, are key to the plot going forward. They are meant to be remembered because they will be important going forward. 

The reader has only a limited capacity or willingness to remember details, so it is important for the writer to signal which details the reader is supposed to remember. (I find this a common problem in manuscripts I see in critique. There is all sorts of detail packed into them, but no indication which of it I am supposed to focus on.)

It sounds like in this story, the war is a background detail. It is part of the scene -- this takes place in wartime, and presumably could only take place in wartime -- but the story is not about the war.

So, you need to signal that the war is not something that the reader should focus on. There are various techniques you can use to signal what the reader is to focus on. I don't pretend to be able to catalogue them all. But here are some suggestions:

1. The protagonist is the main guide to what is important. If they touch something, it is important. If they talk about something, it is important. If they think about something, it is important. (This is where first person narrative gets tricky, since it seems to make everything the narrator mentions important.)

2. Things in tension are important. Things at rest are less important. One obvious way to make a war less important is to tell us who won up front. That takes the tension out of the war, leaving the tension of what happened to a particular person in that war. 

3. Things that recur are important. Things that are only mentioned once are unimportant. As soon as we meet some object, some character, some idea for a second time, we intuit that they are going to be important and we start tracking them. (And we will be frustrated if those characters don't pay off in the end. This is where loose ends come from in a story.)

4. On the other hand, things that are pervasive are less important and thing that are particular are more important. If the war becomes the pervasive background to your story but with no particular features of events portrayed, we will likely conclude that is is unimportant to the story. There is more background than foreground in every painting, but we know it is the foreground that we should focus on.