We shall not discuss my cold.

[truepenny]

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.

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

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think that's the good reason for having a character be something artistic. But I get pretty annoyed with people who want to play on the "artistic creation is magical" thing, and there are more than plenty of them. Writers (painters etc.) are not the only Most Special-est Jobs in the Whole Wide World. I would be a lot more impressed with a writer who could show me the magic of a damn good bureaucrat -- not as a contrast, like Neo, but as a worthy job done superbly, able to inform a magical worldview.

As much as I sigh, "Oh, the glamour of a writer's life" every time I scrub the johns, I think writers have too little respect for less glamorous professions.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Amen. I love giving characters day jobs because it helps to round them, I think.

Diane Duane's Stealing the Elf King's Roses has magical lawyers.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And if I recall correctly, they're even actual lawyers, not detectives who get to make dramatic courtroom speeches.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think so.

[mackatlaw.livejournal.com]

Are you serious? Diane Duane has a book I didn't know about, and it involves actual lawyers and magic? I must check this out, for obvious reasons!

Some year I will dress for Halloween as Matt Murdock, the superhero Daredevil, when I feel like dying my hair red and getting an ID badge, blind glasses and a cane. I'd love to read a story where the lawyer is the hero, just for the sheer kick and self-identifyingness/wish-fulfillment of it.

Mack

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. Deliver us from Specialness.

And I agree--a book truly about a sensawunda bureaucrat would be brilliant. But, again, the theme of the novel would be the job. Which is my problem. The theme of the novel is not the job. (And she's not a teacher, either, which is the other convenient default. She's being very difficult about the whole thing.)

We give our characters jobs for reasons, I guess is what I'm getting at. And I haven't figured out what Blanche's reason is.

[/whine]

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But just think how much better it will be than if you randomly picked a career out of a hat and it had nothing to do with her!

Yah, I know: sometimes doing things the good way is small comfort.

[larryhammer]

Um. I've read the book about the sensawunda bueaucrat as heroine -- and it was not brilliant. It was horrible. Way too much the Speshulness. (She even used regulations during the climax.)



---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Wowsers.

I would contend, though, that the problem with that book is not necessarily located in the heroine's job. From your description, her Mary Sue-ness would have infected anything she turned her hand to.

[larryhammer]

Yup. I almost commented that it hadn't mattered that regs were the weapon of choice, because she would have won no matter what.

The sad thing -- well, one of the sadder things -- is that the bureaucrat-as-hero was the one original skiffy idea of the work.

---L.

[cassiphone.livejournal.com]

For convenience, I suppose you could look into other kinds of freelance jobs? Of course, editing is the first that comes to mind. :)

Teaching is useful because of the long holiday.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

Something like the way Mr. Incredible did insurance-adjustment, assuming his bosses let him?

[razorsmile.livejournal.com]

I would be a lot more impressed with a writer who could show me the magic of a damn good bureaucrat -- not as a contrast, like Neo, but as a worthy job done superbly, able to inform a magical worldview.

Gnaeus Patulcius from Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson. Not the protagonist, but the closest thing to what you have in mind.

[(Anonymous)]

Your point #3 can also happen if the protagonist is a reader. In Mysterious Paris (my WiP), Manon reads the Jardin mysteries her mother wrote, and I include excerpts within Mysterious Paris.

The excerpts serve multiple purposes: (1) Because Manon's mystery/adventure does not start until later in the story, the excerpts introduce elements of mystery & adventure early on. (2) They connect the reader to something important to Manon (who spends much of her time reading these mysteries). (3) They become clues in Manon's mystery.

[libskrat]

I dunno. I think you're pointing to a push-pull thing in middle-class American society about job and/vs. identity. Videlicet and to wit, a job that is not identity-forming is uninteresting and beneath notice.

I've been on both sides of that divide. Right now I pursue a profession that I find profoundly identity-forming, just as much "I am" as "I do." But that doesn't mean that my previous jobs didn't contribute to what I am in useful and sometimes bizarre ways. The "what" of a job, the tasks involved, is not the whole of work; I find it thoroughly weird that America tries to bundle everything salient about work into that.

Plenty of people I've worked with treat their jobs as pick-up-put-down, despite the huge bite out of their time that of course those jobs represent. I find them rather more interesting than the "I am what I do" crowd in some ways (and truth be told, I'm finding that crowd a not entirely comfortable fit, sometimes). If their work is not who they are, why did they choose it, and what does it say about them? What are they away from work? How do they think of the work-self? and so on.

Work is a social context. Work is a means to other ends. Work is an agora and an agon and now and then a source of anagnorisis. For some people, the fact of work, and the self-sufficiency work makes possible, is far more important than the nature of the work -- I was like that myself, after graduate school.

So I guess my challenge to you, truepenny, is to let your character tell you (as she seems to be telling you) that the nature of her work doesn't actually matter all that much, though the fact of work does, and see where that takes you. And her.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm also talking about fiction rather than real life.

In fiction, things need to have a certain amount of coherence. Real life is under no such constraints.

[libskrat]

So find the coherence somewhere other than the nature of the work. I suspect there is some.

I can construct a coherent narrative out of my life that includes my work. The focus would just be elsewhere than Python and SGML and Microsoft Access. Nothing wrong with that.

[libskrat]

I think I made you angry, truepenny, and that wasn't my intent, and it's been needling at me. I apologize sincerely.

Let me try an example, at the risk of needing to apologize again. There's a bit in Tehanu that always thrills me, when Tenar is righteously pissed at her son Spark for dismissing her and through her "women's work." Ged suggests that Spark will have to learn to do the work at some point, and Tenar says (paraphrased more or less inexactly) "He'll find some fool woman to do it for him. I hate to leave her the twenty years I've scrubbed that table!"

Now, for "scrubbed that table" LeGuin could have used forty-'leven different household tasks without disturbing the theme in the slightest. The point is not the content of the work; it's the social meaning of the work, and I just love how LeGuin troubles the waters there with Ged (in Tehanu and in my hands-down favorite Earthsea story ever, "On the High Marsh").

Moreover, calling Tenar "a housewife," defining her by her work as middle-class America tends to do to people, misses the mark wholly. She is Arha-that-was; she is Tenar of the Ring; she is Therru's saviour; she is Lebannen's friend; she serves a king's vintage in clay cups with aplomb. What she does -- even for twenty-odd years! -- is not who she is, even though she chose it and it shapes her perspective, even though it's important to her and to the book.

(See also "Gwilan's Harp" and "Malheur County," both in Wind's Twelve Quarters I believe, for LeGuinnish meditations on the potential impoverishment of defining oneself by one's work. I like "Harp" better than "County," possibly because "County" hits too close to home.)

My contention is that this richness happens when the concept of work is unpacked beyond "job duties," for example into the wonderful social relationships and choice-points that rosefox points out below. I suspect, though I don't know, that your annoyance at the mystery convention of "he's a _____, and also a detective!" stems at least in part from the job being used merely as a plot convenience to introduce the mystery and odd skills that may be needed to solve it. Work is more than skills and tasks; turning it into plot convenience is shortchanging it. It's even possible, I think, to say "this character works," and find that thematically, literarily, useful and interesting, without even knowing what the character actually works at.

And I thought that might be one way out of your dilemma. That's all. Again, I'm sorry.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You didn't make me angry.

But we're not talking about the same thing.

It's not that I think you're wrong about the troubled and vastly complicated relationship between work and identity. It's that ...

See, I don't know how to explain myself. Especially not without sounding like a jerk.

Let's try this way, and if my tone is offensive, I apologize and swear up down and sideways that I don't mean it to be. You're thinking of my protagonist as a fully-rounded character, as a person. At the moment, I'm not. I'm thinking of her as a variable in an equation. Partly, this is probably because, of all the characters who can potentially have speaking roles in this story--including the dead ones--she's the one about whom I know least. So she's still a chess piece. I know her name, and I know her function in the plot (insofar as I've worked the plot out), but I don't know anything about her. What I'm trying to do is define the protagonist-shaped hole in the middle of my narrative.

But she's also a chess piece because this part of writing a novel is very cold blooded and artificial (in the Elizabethan sense of "practicing artifice"). I'm not interested in her as a person and her relationship with her job. I'm interested in her as a cog in this story and how to make her work in that context. Being a character, rather than a real person, her true job is to serve the story.

Now, some novels (like Tehanu) thematize the problem of work and identity, and in those cases, the philosophical questions you're pointing at are deeply relevant and important. But this isn't one of those novels. Her job is a background detail. I have to have it because this is a novel set in roughly contemporary America, and because (to borrow Joseph Campbell for a moment) it's part of the ordinary world she's leaving behind. Because she's a modern American woman, regardless of how her job impacts her identity, it is going to be a matter of concern to her, and it is going to occupy a certain amount of her thinking. (Especially since most employers are not sympathetic when you tell them you need time off to do the Hero's Journey.)

And therefore I, as the little tin god of this snowglobe, need that job to fall within certain rather narrow parameters so that it doesn't throw the balance of the story off. Five huskies running north, one husky running east. And in trying to find a job that would fit my parameters and yet also fit with my very nebulous sense of my protagonist as a character (because if I think of her only as a chess piece, that rips the soul right out of the machine), I realized why making one's protagonist an author is such a handy workaround.

I don't know if that makes any sense at all, but it's the best I can do.

I repeat: I'm not angry. Just difficult to explain. *g*

[larryhammer]

FWIW, it makes perfect sense to me, and isn't at all jerky.

---L.

[libskrat]

Yeah, I think I get you now, and thanks for not being angry.

Let me suggest, then, that a lot of things besides writing and art are done on a freelance basis -- everything from doctoring of various sorts to publication tasks such as book design, typesetting and indexing to computer programming to construction work to name-it. Not a few people have been very creative about wrenching jobs around to fit their time needs, both daily and to cope with longer-term matters like Hero's Journeys. And, of course, the better they are at what they do, the rarer their talent or skill, and the more status what they do carries, the easier it is for them to name their terms.

The next time you hit the library, it might be worth going into the career-books aisle for a book or two on freelance, temporary, and/or part-time job possibilities. You might happen across just the right thing to bring the errant husky back in line.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if there could be a clue in the way various "a __________ who is also a detective!" novels handle this? I'm not doing a good job of thinking of examples, though, because I read mostly Golden Age mysteries and I think contemporary ones do this lots more.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. Caterers, house-cleaners, professors ... I imagine that if you name a profession, any profession, SOMEONE will have written a series mystery around it. With the appropriate puns in the titles.

Unfortunately, I deeply dislike that particular genre convention. (Like you, I mostly read Golden Age mysteries.) It's too gimmicky for my taste. (Except for Emma Lathen, who is the exception for me to all sorts of rules.) And in those books, it's the protagonist's job that brings him or her in contact with the mystery, so the job does have use-value in the story.

*snrch* I just realized that Murder Must Advertise is a neatly prescient reversal of that: "a detective who is also a copy-writer!"

[rosefox]

My current eating-my-brain WIP talks a lot about work, because work takes up a lot of time in people's lives. In one place, everyone is supposed to feel a calling, but in reality, most people go along with tradition and just do what their parents did. In another place, children are apprenticed at the whims of their parents, getting more or less prestigious positions depending on how much money and influence their parents have. In a third place, there's an option that doesn't exist elsewhere (priesthood at the main temple) but they're lacking options that do exist elsewhere (fishing, because you can't fish the sacred waters, or scientific research, because most people of that mindset get sucked into the priesthood whether they like it or not); that doesn't mean that people who wanted to fish become priests instead, but someone who travels to the Sacred City because he wants to be a priest might meet someone who has a good temperament for fishing and say, hey, if you go down to Chantai you could do that, and the other person's eyes are opened. People in some jobs travel a lot, trading knickknacks or gathering intelligence, and others might be born and grow up and die without ever seeing another town. As the writer, I can see all these options and differences. Most people on the ground can't, and that's what makes it interesting.

Each place has limited choices, and there will be people who are entirely satisfied with those choices and people who are very frustrated by those choices and misunderstandings between the two and those who resign themselves and those who resign themselves and later find out that they like it after all and those who try to change the way things are and those who pack up and leave, and some people will hate prestigious jobs and some will love derided jobs and some will work day in day out and identify with their jobs and some will just do it until they can afford to retire and take up the second career they always wanted and some people were born rich and will die rich and never have to work a day in between, and a lot depends on the size of the community and the way it handles money... and all of it is about who you are, where you started, where you want to go. How jobs are acquired and handled and left is entirely a function of that. How much you care about money is entirely a function of that (well, that and whether you grow up in the quasi-communist gift economy of the Floating City or the unbridled avarice of Chantai or the all-in-service-to-the-temple mindset of the Sacred City or...). Some people are their jobs and some just do their jobs, but both attitudes, and all the attitudes in between, contribute to those people's stories. It's just a matter of finding out how.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

I admit, I'm much too nice to a certain set of characters. They're grad students, and I let them have all the wacky adventures over winter and summer and breaks. I need to really screw them over in that regard some day.

[(Anonymous)]

Hey now, the grad students get screwed over enough in real life, thank you very much! I'm delighted to hear that in your writing, they're having wacky adventures, 'cause I can tell you that in my grad-student existence, there isn't nearly enough wacky. Or adventure, for that matter. Unless you want to count getting violently ill off bad sushi recently, which is certainly not an adventure I'd recommend.

Unrelatedly: a variation on Webster!! OMG!! Beside myself! Want to hear much, much more about this!

the grrly grrl

[larryhammer]

::nods::

For my contemporary YAs, I use what they're reading/discussing in English class for that ressonance. Which sometimes feels like something of a cheat.

---L.

[floatingtide.livejournal.com]

Sure, a character could be perfectly satisfied with their job instaling oven-wiring. But if they're satisfied, where's the story?

And sure, a character could be a teacher, cowboy or lawyer, but if that has nothing to do with the story then it can be delt with in a couple of sentences.

If the job isn't part of the story it's still good for establishing things. It's a shortcut to showing where the character is within sociaty, and it can show the reader what the character has to lose.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

(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.

I'm not quite sure what it says about me that I found nothing in The Matrix - not the virtual reality stuff, not the utterly stupid reason for keeping all the humans in VR, not even the weird mystical crap - harder to suspend my disbelief in than the idea that a programmer good enough to have the degree of l33t sk1llz to attract the attention of interesting people in leather coats would put up with having to wear a suit and be in work at nine.

If I'm writing humans in a roughly contemporary setting, they tend to default to being programmers, because it's a line of work I understand and am good at. That said, I try to bear in mind Samuel Delany's comment, which I would probably be able to place had I not read a huge pile of Delany essays in one gulp four years ago and very little since, to the effect that one corollary of "write what you know" is to be careful, if writing about something you do every day, to make sure you present it in ways that will be accessible to someone who does not.