Why You Should Write About Your Characters at Work | Literary Hub

Work was something I knew a lot about. I'd shown up in his classroom after spending years working blue collar jobs, with no real idea of how to apply my compulsion to write a novel. Craig had emphasized that the work a character does reveals who they are more effectively than telling the reader who they are, and that made sense to me. If we see a farmer farming, we might see that he walks with a limp, or see a scar, or a missing finger, or the dirt-stained calluses on his hands. We might see that the farmer is a woman, and that she has the callused hands. We would also see the farm, and the isolated farmhouse, and maybe some physical details that signify the time period. We might see the farmer's six kids also working the fields, and a speck-size church steeple far in the distance, piercing the horizon. You get the picture, and that's the point - when we see the character in scene, at work, it opens the door to the details of a much larger picture.