Uncommon Careers

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):

  1. Voice-over actor. Cartoons or commercials. Either works.
  2. Improvisational comedian. I’ve played with the idea, but never really took it anywhere.
  3. Hand model. Because I can just see the “so what do you do?” scene.
  4. Sommelier. We see restaurateurs and wait-staff all the time. We rarely see the guy who picks the wines.
  5. Cab driver. They’re always incidental characters. They shouldn’t be.

What careers would you like to see in fiction.