Give your hero a job

I wrote a blog post for Rachel Firasek’s blog called The Professional Hero and Heroine. In it I talk about how important it is for characters to have careers—not just as background but as key parts of their characterization. No, not every novel calls for your characters to have exciting careers, but when the author knows what her characters do for a living—and knows what sort of tasks they would perform, whether it’s a business tycoon, a crime fighter, or a professional musician—inevitably the characterization is richer, deeper, and more authentic:

Characters without careers—or without a job that they care about, a life outside the front-and-center romance—run the risk of being flat and one-dimensional. I’ve read far too many unpublished manuscripts where the writer obviously has no idea what her character actually does for a living. The generic “tycoon” who never goes to work to earn his billions is particularly prevalent, yet implausible.

 Read the rest here. It’s sort of a companion piece to the deleted scene I posted here the other day, in which I describe how Jacob, from Temptation, makes a wooden box in his workshop. Once I knew what he did for a living, my story had an extra layer of conflict that I hadn’t anticipated. And I also had a rich trove of setting material to enhance my scenes, many of which occur in his workshop.

What sort of career do you see your characters having? How would you go about researching that profession? I’d love to hear some comments, either here or at Rachel’s blog.