How Our Jobs Shape Our Lives
On the first and third Saturday of each month, I attend a writing group. I’ve been in attendance for a year-and-a-half, now, and I’ve seen a collection of characters pass through. We take in everyone: First-time writers, longtime hobbyists, screenwriters, novelists, poets, nonfiction writers, and people from every genre. It’s more of an accountability and moral support group than a critique group, but we have a craft book we read from and discuss each week.
This past week, the chapter was on a topic every writer inevitably comes across: character filtering. More specifically, filtering a character’s description and worldview through the perspective of their job.
And one person in particular—who’d come for the first time—spoke up. She said: We are more than our work. My job doesn’t define me.
I replied: Then why are you here?
Let’s back up.
Writing Group, 10:00AM
As we had several new members this session, we took the time to go around the room and introduce ourselves, our background, and medium/genre of choice. On the docket was a science-fiction enthusiast who wanted to start writing stories again, a woman who specialized in Christian fiction, a french instructor with the desire to learn to write in english, and a high-school english teacher expressing the drive to get back into writing, and to encourage her own kids to write as well.
The chapter we read this session, aptly titled Get a Job from Thrill Me by Benjamin Percy (which I would highly recommend to any writer,) was an essay around why we should bother to flesh out how our characters make money and live in their day-to-day, and how this impacts a character’s focus on the world.
For instance:
“The trucker should not have a laugh like a booming bassoon. The trucker should laugh like a hot wire ripping apart at eighty-five miles per hour. The kindergarten teacher should have Crayola-blue eyes, not gunmetal blue eyes. Unless, of course, the title of the story is Ms. Snodgrass Finally Snaps.”
I read this passage aloud. It’s a solid, straightforward example of how occupation can help us to define characters on paper, if leaning towards the extreme. There is, of course, the stereotype trap we must avoid falling into, but a quick description like this can often help us to build memorable characters fast.
Beside me, the English teacher raised her voice.
“A job is just a job,” she said. “It doesn’t define someone.”
“There is so much more to life that surrounds somebody’s job,” said the French instructor. “We must be careful not to stereotype.”
Both people were absolutely correct: a job, an occupation, any one thing will not completely define someone’s persona/personality. But just as an English teacher may want to find a different job, her very presence at the writing group spoke volumes.
“Then why are you here?” I said to her. “You came here, telling us that you want your children to grow up as writers. You explained to us that you want your students to find ways to be more passionate about writing. You spoke of wanting to develop your own career through writing. How can you say work doesn’t define a part of you when your entire point of view has been developed through this lens as an educator and an English teacher?”
The truth is in our actions, not our words.
I may have been too harsh in the moment, but I do believe that there is something critical here to understand how we work, and that denying so much of yourself because you aren’t happy with it is a disservice to discovering why you got there in the first place.
Through identifying these aspects of ourselves and others, we not only learn to portray more realistic characters, but come to understand more about ourselves.
Be honest with yourself
I’m no exception to this rule. I have worked as a graphic designer—not necessarily by passion, or intent—for the past several years, and while there is much that I do to distance myself from my work as often as possible outside of it, the fact remains that I notice typefaces on websites and recognize stock photo models on billboards as I drive to work.
When I set up my Scrivener file, it’s critical to me that the sentence spacing, the font, and the paragraph indent spacing are done intentionally. When I go to the bookstore, I find myself poring over the lettering on the covers, margin spacing, and chapter headers. It isn’t a factor I pride myself on, but if someone were to describe me with eyes that swerved to the poorly-kerned “a” and “v” in “Avalanche”, I would hardly be able to deny it.
What do your actions say about you?
Outside of the actual role that we perform in the job we do in our day-to-day, we continue to be defined by what we do.
To start working on understanding yourself, ask these questions:
Why do you have the job that you have?
Why do you show up to work on time, or late each day?
Why have you stayed?
Why did you leave?
How much money do you make?
How does this impact how you handle your life outside of work?
In our society, a job defines much of our lives. While the specifics vary between cultures, it stands to reason that our social circles, our income, our time constraints, and our comfort with life as a whole is due in part to what we do with the majority of our waking hours.
I would never want anyone to define me wholly as a graphic designer. The English teacher I spoke with contains multitudes: she has on her mind her family, her passions, her job, amongst countless other things.
This is the brilliant part about people—we are never just one thing.
To quote Benjamin Percy once again:
Whether we like it or not, work defines us. Work dominates our lives. And we have an obligation, in prose and poetry, in the interest of realism, and in the service of point of view, voice, setting, metaphor, and story, to try to incorporate credibly and richly the working lives of our characters.
Writing is an act of empathy. To do it well, and do it effectively, it’s pivotal to understand where people come from—and why we come from.
