I don’t know about you, but every time I open my news app, I see headline after headline containing the dreaded word: Employment. DON’T RUN AWAY. I swear not to prod you too deeply into job-related existential crises. Minor prodding only. Promise.
Anyway, the combination of all these news articles got me thinking about my own characters and how they live within their respective economies.
In fiction, this diversity of career paths can be even broader than what we see in the world around us, which opens up a universe of possibilities.
How does employment shape our characters’ needs and ambitions?
Because jobs tend to take up a good deal of time in any person’s daily life, they drastically influence the way we live with ourselves, other people, and the world around us. Jobs provide us with financial security (or don’t). They provide a community to exist within (or don’t). They dictate where we live (or don’t). Taking a second to slow down and explore how those influences are expressed in the lives of our characters can be a fascinating way to understand their motivations and talents even more deeply than before.
For your writing pleasure, here are a few guided writing prompts to help you imagine just how deeply your characters’ occupations have infiltrated their daily lives:
In your own life or the life of one of your characters, how does your/their community make money? Social class will have an ENORMOUS impact on the answer to this question. This line of inquiry is especially important for world-building if you are creating an entirely new realm or universe that operates differently than our present reality. Perhaps your character’s community is an elite class of scholars and academics that makes money by researching for their wealthy patrons. Or maybe your character’s community is centered around the naval trade of magical goods, vulnerable to sea and storm. Considering how these community dynamics are expressed in different characters’ lives will give you interesting insight into their own values and talents. Write for ten minutes.
Now, don’t freak out, but I invite you to think about your own job (or lack thereof) and how that influences your day-to-day life. Do you or your character diligently rise at 7am every morning? What about the dangers of feeding animals at the zoo or passing machinery down a factory line? Without thinking too hard about this prompt, consider an average day of work in your own or a character’s life, and write it out. Write for seven minutes.
Since we’ve started thinking about specific jobs, whether real or imagined, I invite you to think about how a job teaches skills that seep into personal lives. Perhaps a school teacher constantly finds herself in the role of “mom friend,” or a deep sea diver focuses on his breath when he’s frightened. These tiny details will bring characters to life on the page because they make characters believable, constantly intertwined with their environment in overlapping ways. What skills or talents might you or your character (un)consciously transfer to your/their home life? Write for nine minutes.
For this last guided prompt, think about the careers toward which different personalities are drawn. Perhaps an introvert desperately wants to be a master gardener, an analytical thinker tinkers around engineering, or a charming person is drawn to politics. With all these assumptions in mind, write yourself or a character into a job totally at odds with your/their personality type. Write for five minutes.
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KAY TEEKELL is Claire’s Summer Communications Associate and fellow creative writer. She has five years of writing and editing experience that ranges from content writing for blogs and magazines to grant writing for nonprofit organizations. Kay is passionate about the power of storytelling and strives to amplify voices that might otherwise be forgotten. She is excited to use her artistic and literary skills in her professional aspirations and will continue to develop her talents for the rest of her life.