I’ve shared in thoughtful panel discussions with Andrew Knighton at conventions, as well as more informal conversations. I am very pleased to share his article on the relationships between a character’s job of work and various aspects of a story.

Work is a fundamental part of life. It can provide purpose, frustrations, and a roof over your head. In a capitalist society, it’s the thing that most clearly defines your place in society.

Because of that, jobs can bring fictional characters to life in novel and fascinating ways. Not so much the common protagonist jobs, the warriors and police officers who power so many stories, but the unexpected choices, the jobs that are unusual for fictional protagonists even if they’re common in the real world.

Working the Story

Work as Character

A character’s job can tell you a lot about who they are at heart.

Take Ten Low, Stark Holborn’s frontier combat medic. She’s a wounded character in a wounded world, trying to patch people together as they get shot and stabbed and flung around. She’s clearly chosen this role to put some distance between her and who she was before, for reasons that become clear as the story unfolds. No one’s paying her to heal, but it’s definitely her job.

Charlie Mason, the protagonist of Neil Williamson’s Charlie Says, is a standup comic whose performances express his own insecurities, his fears, and the changes he’s gone through over the years. His profession becomes a hook the whole character hangs off, and with it the themes of the story. The standup comic as stand-in for modern Britain, defensive and abrasive, caught between the instincts to mock himself or to cruelly attack others.

That can extend to a group of characters. In N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, the avatar of the Bronx works at an arts centre, an outsider and creative; Brooklyn is a rapper turned politician, furiously battling the system; while Padmini, the avatar of Queens, is a logically-minded graduate student working in mathematics. Their professional roles reflect their personalities which in turn reflect the places they embody. Their jobs root them in geography and society, highlighting the connections of modern urban life and specifically of New York.

Work as Story

While any job can provide a window into a character’s heart, others more directly affect the story.

Dan Mackmain, the protagonist of Juliet E. McKenna’s Green Man series, is a man whose career reflects his character. He’s a carpenter and handyman who makes carved wooden objects, someone who’s practical and connected to the land, creative yet down-to-earth. His connection to the wood and world is what draws him into supernatural danger, but it also provides the pragmatic, worldly skills that let him survive otherworldly threats. It’s a hook for adventure and a tool to survive it.

That path from a character’s job to the challenges they’re going to face can be more direct. Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker features a pair of protagonists who work in different specialist fields, one an animal scientist and the other an investment executive. Their perspectives let the story explore economic and environmental systems without drowning readers in textbook explanations or political diatribes, while the investor’s deals in a fictional commodity called “extinction credits” embodies economic structures gone wrong. Their shared knowledge gives the characters both the tools and the motive to go crack the systems of the world open, angles from which to see society and to shape it.

Work as Inspiration

Sometimes the job is the whole reason a story exists.

That category is where my new novel, The Executioner’s Blade, fits in. Inspired by Joel F. Harrington’s history book The Faithful Executioner, I started thinking about what the life of an executioner would be like and who would take on a job like that. It’s a job that’s been central to the functioning of many justice systems, but that’s viewed with fear and suspicion. A killer of killers, wielding violence to deter violent acts, living in tension with societies that want them to do the work but don’t want to know them afterwards.

I became fascinated with what sort of person would do that. Someone interested in justice. Someone who was happy to be shunned. Someone comfortable shedding blood. Preferably someone with the skills and experience to kill quickly and cleanly. Maybe someone living in tension with herself.

Inevitably, I thought about problems with capital punishment, not least the fact that miscarriages of justice happen. Sometimes the wrong person gets punished, and when the punishment is execution there’s no coming back from that. How would it feel for an executioner to learn that she’d killed an innocent person, that she’d been used to perpetrate a further injustice and cover the murderers trail? It felt like a good motive for a story, a character wanting to put right a wrong she’d unwittingly done, a murder mystery in which the killer is also the investigator.

The job became the story.

Collected Work

If there’s one book that shows how much you can do with a single profession, it’s Steve Toase’s Under My Skin, a collection of archaeological horror.

Through ten different stories, Toase shows how the same job can take a person, and an author, in very different directions. Characters range from the obsessive to the world-weary, the idealistic to the cynical. Their work includes digging holes, plotting maps, identifying finds, and theorising on what they’ve found. We see the giddy excitement of discovery and the repetitive tedium of paperwork. We meet characters fascinated by the work and others worn down by it.

The stories also find different ways to make the archaeological fantastical and unnerving. It could be something uncanny found in the ground, a colleague becoming increasingly strange thanks to his discoveries, or a survey of a town where the houses themselves become horrifying. In one case, archaeology becomes a profession for travelling to and interacting with another realm.

The same job, presented in ten very different ways.

And All the Rest…

Toase’s book left me thinking there should be more stories about archaeologists, because there’s so much potential in what they do. But maybe that’s true of any profession if you dig into it deeply enough or even sprinkle it with the twisting magic of genre fiction. We could be reading about Medusa’s hairdresser, about a takeout chef on an intergalactic highway, about stable hands cleaning out the manticore pens. There are books out there about magical bakers and the fire fighters in a world of dragons, but we could have so much more, a chance to see the fascinating characters that different careers can create.

#

Andrew Knighton’s new novel, The Executioner’s Blade, is out from Northodox Press on 28 November. You can find him at andrewknighton.com.