We shall not discuss my cold.

Instead, I want to note something I realized the other day. Probably this has been pointed out before, but it was new to me, and I want to put it where I can look at it.

I figured out why so many novel protagonists are novelists and artists.

And, no, it's not just narcissism--although I'm sure that plays a role, too.

I'm working (I should almost put that in quote marks, but I have been noodling at it a good deal recently) on a Southern Gothic retelling of John Webster's The White Devil. Like a translation, only more so. And one of the things this translation requires is that my heroine*, being a modern woman, have a job.

And the question of her job is driving me crazy. Now, Blanche Ballantyne is not a novelist or an artist, but I understand why it would be so easy, and feel so much like a solution, to make her one.

1. It's a job--one of the few--that I know from the inside. (And, no, she's not a graduate student either.)

2. It's a pick-up-put-down-able kind of thing--no need to worry about how much vacation she gets, or whether the crises at work will allow of her running off to Tennessee to find out about her roots.

3. It's thematic.

This is the kicker. If Blanche is a novelist or a painter or other representational artist (as opposed to a performance artist), then the novel or painting or other project she's working on can always be twisted and twirled to resonate with the actual subject matter of the book. Which means that her occupation, as a facet of her character, reinforces rather than distracts from the novel's goals. Every mention of her job for grounding does not have to be balanced against the degree to which it stops the progress of the story.

(I do want to distinguish between novels in which writing is itself a theme (Misery springs instantly to mind) and novels in which writing as an occupation serves the theme (continuing with Stephen King, who does this a lot, IT for one, where all the protagonists have those conveniently artistic, put-downable jobs except for poor Aeneas-like Mike; "The Body" for another; Desperation/The Regulators for a third.) The two are different beasts, and I'm not talking about the former.)

Making the protagonist a novelist makes the huskies pulling the sled all run in the same direction, instead of five dogs running north and one dog running east.

Science fiction and (secondary-world) fantasy get around this problem in other ways. Fantasy novels rarely world-build the sorts of societies where your characters have a 9 to 5 job, or where your character's work is not integral to their part in the story (wizards, kings, etc.) And science fiction makes careers thematic by default, because they're sfnal. Or because in some way the point of the story is the disjunct between the protagonist's identity and their career. (Bizarrely, the example I can think of is the opening of The Matrix--before we get into the whole one pill, two pill, red pill, blue pill thing--where Neo's diurnal life as a suit clearly means nothing compared to his noctural life as a hacker.) But writing horror or contemporary fantasy, it's perfectly possible to have a character whose story has no connection whatsoever to their job.

And this is why the trap of self-referentialism is always there, always baited.

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*Not Vittoria, for those of you familiar with the play, but her grandddaughter.