Get to Work

A mistake that beginning writers often make is when they forget that their character must exist in a world that resembles our own: the character must eat and sleep, and must therefore have money to buy groceries and pay rent, and must therefore have a job.

Some amazing poems and stories have been built around a character's job, and that's what you should try for in your exercise today.

To start, make a quick list of jobs that you find interesting or jobs that you've done before. If you're having a hard time coming up with that, try going back to a newspaper site and looking at the classifieds, or typing in the words "most interesting jobs" or "jobs in (my home state)" or a similar term into a search engine, and see what pops out at you. When I do this exercise and go to the classifieds of my local paper, I get: dental assistant, short order cook, diesel mechanic in Antarctica???!! Whoa.

I'm not sure I'm qualified to write a story about a diesel mechanic in Antarctica without a whole lot of research, but it'd be fun to try. Or I could honestly start a story with any of those occupations.

Pick one. Next, make a list of details you know about that job. What kind of clothes does that person wear on the job? What hours do they keep? What's the pay like? How do you get that job? What kinds of skills does it require? This might take a little research, but you don't have to do a ton of research, just enough at this point that you can imagine the job.

Now make a list of things that could go wrong on this kind of job or a mistake that the person could make on the job. Remember how we've been talking about how conflict is what drives stories.

And finally, write a scene that opens with something going wrong at a character's job (i.e., the moment that the "moving" action of the story begins.

So maybe, in my scenario, I could write a scene that starts with a dental assistant who just erased a patient's entire file, or accidentally cut a patient's lip, or a patient groped her while she was cleaning his teeth--oh, that would be perfect and terrible, being groped by a patient, ack, and I'm sure it happens.

And now I have the seed for a story.

As you write this scene you'll have to fill in the details and ask questions: Has she worked on this patient before and noticed anything? Who else does she work with? Would someone come to her rescue or not? Is she the sort of person to exact revenge? What tools does she have at her disposal to do something about this problem? What will the consequences for her actions be?

You may find in writing that this scene feels like it will lead you off in another direction, with the work problem not really being a big deal, but allowing you access into a character's life. Or the work problem might be what the entire story is about. It could go either way.

Remember that you can also choose to continue the first line exercise, do the news story exercise if you haven't already, or try your hand at one of the generating exercises in the Dropbox file. Or, if you already have a story rolling, you could write a page to continue that story.

Whatever you choose, have fun with it, and I'll see you on Friday!