I’ve been thinking a lot that characters in fiction either have very high-profile or very low-profile careers, and they’re generally pretty generic, so that if they need to plausibly have a lot (or very little) of money, the author can arrange that. You see lawyers, for example, but do you ever see a mesothelioma lawyer ? I never have.
This, then, is my list of five careers I’ve love to see explored in fiction (and not by characters only in one or two scenes):
- Voice-over actor. Cartoons or commercials. Either works.
- Improvisational comedian. I’ve played with the idea, but never really took it anywhere.
- Hand model. Because I can just see the “so what do you do?” scene.
- Sommelier. We see restaurateurs and wait-staff all the time. We rarely see the guy who picks the wines.
- Cab driver. They’re always incidental characters. They shouldn’t be.
What careers would you like to see in fiction.
Exploring the improvisational comedian would be interesting. I wonder if one would feel compelled to create a character who always ‘on’.