I was sitting in Sin’s quarters, dining on that delectable cuisine by those Make a Run for the Border people and discussing [i.e. bitching about] my job. My real-life job as a student coordinator at a University department. Only that’s not my official title—it’s what I do—but my title is much further down on the pay scale and food chain. Hence part of the whining. Sin was bitching too, though she’s smarter than me about making sure she is titled appropriately at all times. (I know, I was amazed as you are to find out that Sin has a full-time gig when she’s not being an International Secret Spy Assassin for Anarchy Now! I don’t know how she has the time.)
We do this a lot when we get together, because when 40+ hours of your week are spent at one place with the same people, that says a lot about you as a person. It defines you, to a degree, even though being the department’s HAK (Holder of All Knowledge) doesn’t exactly factor into your daily brag list.
You can find all sorts of characteristics about a person through their job. Are you a people person? (Oh, hell no.) Are you a diplomat? (Clearly not.) How are you at managing people to get the day-to-day crap done, without having people micromanage you to death? (This, I’m pretty good at. Mostly because I frighten people until they leave me the hell alone so I can do what they’ve requested.)
Sin operates a lot like this. Only she hears my stories and says, “You’re too damned nice. I would have been fired by now. Actually, I would never have been there because you couldn’t pay me a million dollars an hour to put up with the crap you put up with.”
What does this say about Sin? It says she’s a smart person who knows exactly what to say to her best friend when she’s whining, yet again, about her job.
What does it say about me? It says I have all the career ambition of a gnat. The business world, even in college academia, holds little to no appeal to me other than paying my bills. I do not wake up in the morning and go, “Golly, I can’t wait to file some programs of study and show Dr. Spritzor how to copy and paste within a Word document.” It’s a job. I have the same attitude about work as Red Foreman relates to his son, Eric: “It’s called work because it’s work. If work were fun, it’d be called Happy Fun Time.” I have no illusions about what I do for a living.
The point of this being: if you want to know your characters, give them a job. How they take their coffee is not nearly as enlightening as how they deliver customer service.
I’m as guilty of this as the next writer—guiltier actually—because basically every heroine I’ve had has a job similar to mine. They’re either career students or secretaries. I don’t have CEO heroines because I think “what a dismal job”—and I don’t even like to read about heroines who are CEOs. (I know, I have many prejudices.) But whatever—give the character a job of some sort. Have them flip burgers, have them be discovering the cure for cancer—what are they doing? It tells so much about them. It gives some credibility to the character. Otherwise, are all modern day heroines trust-fund babies? What are they doing with their time? Just how many parties can you go to?
Quite a few, I admit…but still.
Tell your characters to get a job already. They need to pull their own weight. And if your character is single, she’s probably not writing full-time as a struggling novelist. Oh, no, she’d at least have to be a vastly successful novelist. Too many modern novels run that risk of sheer disbelief as Friends, which most all of us loved (I did), but the girls were living in an uber-expensive apartment in New York—and one worked as a waitress and the other worked as a chef’s apprentice? What? I could barely afford to buy coffee in New York when I was there and I get paid a little better than a waitress.
Do you vary your characters’ careers? Are there some careers you just can’t imagine doing (don’t want to imagine doing) and thus don’t give your characters? Anyone else tired of CEOs or trust-fund babies? Is there a career you’d love to give a character but you haven’t found the right story for it yet?