Steal From Your Day Job

Use Your Employer’s Industry As Background For Your Stories

Even if your day job is a gopher in the most boring widget-building business in the world, once you starting learning more about the specifics of your industry and the professionals that run it, a) your bosses will take more of a shine to you and b) you’ll suddenly start to see more story possibilities emerging — character ideas will emerge, conflict potentials will suggest themselves, and plot points will develop, hinging on the peculiarities of the strange little world you work in.

Just because you think it’s boring doesn’t mean it isn’t.  There’s been some spectacularly successful novels written about settings that at first sound mind-numbingly boring, that sucked in millions of readers who were dying to know more about that world.  For example — and with apologies to every fashionista and romance reader in the world — most chicklit romances fit the bill.  I admit that I’ve tried reading them, but I just don’t get the attraction.  Millions and millions of readers do, though.

So…instead of just turning up and dragging your butt through 9 to 5, for the next month or so, actively research the milieu, as a research project for a possible novel.

1. Get to know some of the floor workers or support staff, if you don’t already know them. Learn about their gripes and problems, their home life and personal issues. Try to get a broad overview.
2. Try to get to know one or two of the professionals, or at least get to pick the brains of one or two. Interview one for an article, if you can think of no other way to open one up. Find out what makes them tick – the same problems, issues, fears, concerns, and conflicts that drives them in this world. What potential story conflicts can you find here?
3. Scan all the coffee table literature lying around. It’s free, while you’re working the day job, and this professional stuff costs an arm and a leg if you were paying for it elsewhere. Journals, both paper and pixel, provide a ton of information about the professional concerns and issues facing the industry as a whole, and industry newsletters also provide coverage of more contentious issues.
4. Keep your ears pinned back and your eyes wide open. The longer you work in the same day job, the more you’ll pick up about that industry and the peculiarities and conflicts that exist in it-and the more valuable you’ll be as an empathetic, experienced employee.

Word of warning:

Do not under any circumstances, transport a real world issue in your industry over to your novel.  Not even under heavy disguise.  Not even with a “the names have been changed to protect the innocent” warning in fine print.   Don’t even be tempted to pilfer this sort of information.  It’s just not worth the fallout and half-life damage to your fiction career.    You’re supposed to be writing fiction.  Not heavily disguised, contentious, muck-raking crap.

Besides, if you do fall to such temptation and do it badly enough that people recognize the source, your book isn’t going to hit the shelves until at least two years after the issue was “hot”…and that’s just going to make you look like you’re stupid and you can’t keep up with the gossip.

What you’re stealing from your day job is the industry lingo, inspiration for stories, characters, the atmosphere, and the milieu.  And that is all.

First appeared on Anchored Authors in April/May, 2009

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2009. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission.