To make your story new and different, while appealing to tried and true market segments, give your characters new spins on old jobs. You can use the job-hunting resources of the internet to hunt up the perfect career for your characters.

By Jennifer Dunne, copyright May 2001

Follow me to the offices of MegaHuge Publishing Corp. in New York City, where a light still burns in the office of Anne Editor, reading late into the night to get through the pile of manuscripts submitted to her. The first one is about a cowboy and a city girl. Anne's seen that a million times before. The next one has a cowboy, and the former city girl who now owns the ranch where he is the foreman. Anne's only seen that half a million times. The next synopsis features a cowboy locking horns with the college best friend of the city girl that now owns the ranch where he is the foreman. The friend is a holistic veterinarian and equine massage therapist. Holistic veterinarian? Equine massage therapist? Anne smiles. This is new. This is different. And it's still about a cowboy. She'll have no trouble pitching this one at the next editorial meeting.

That's the crass, commercial reason for finding the perfect job for your hero and heroine. Artistically, the perfect job can make your task of establishing conflict much easier. Think about the built-in conflict you've got between your foreman and your holistic veterinarian. He's traditional, and doesn't trust this "New Age" stuff. She's trying to justify her career, as well as proving she's not just there because her friend felt sorry for her and gave her a job. But best of all, once you get past the conflict, there's an underlying unity. Both care deeply about the animals they work with. This allows a far more realistic conflict and resolution than the old advice, "If your hero is a firefighter, your heroine should be an arsonist."

So, how do you create the perfect career for your characters? This summer, I was judging high school students' essays on "What I want to do when I grow up." The students with no initiative had chosen careers like those they saw regularly in real life or on tv -- teachers, nurses, and FBI agents. But those who had taken the opportunity to investigate came up with a wide range of interesting careers, including the equine massage therapist, a local law enforcement track naming exact positions and areas of responsibility, a forest ranger, a ceramics crafter/teacher, and my favorite, the boy who had wanted to be a pirate when he was young, and now wanted to combine a career in high finance and politics (different name, same job). In all cases, the key to finding these perfect careers had been exposure.

You need to be aware of different types of jobs before you can choose one for your characters. If you can go to only one place, read the job profiles at www.jobprofiles.com. (Charter fishing captain? Furniture designer? Flight nurse?) Check out places like careers.yahoo.com, monster.com, or hotjobs.com and look at the job titles they use. Visit places like www.acinet.org/acinet/exp_opt.htm, wetfeet.com/asp/listguides.asp#InsiderType1 or www.wetfeet.com/asp/industries_atoz.asp for discussions of the various jobs that can be found within broad career types. (Fiberoptic system design consultant, anyone?) You can also take career personality tests for your characters, such as the ones at careerexplorer.net/features/career_assessment.asp, ww1.joboptions.com/careertools/selfassessment.jsp?session_id=0&app_id=0, or www.assessment.com.

Now that you know what opportunities are out there for your characters, you can select the perfect job for them. Either find a really cool job you feel like researching and writing about, and build your story around that, or, if you already have a story, find the jobs that meet the criteria of your characters' skills and needs. For example, in my book Raven's Heart, the heroine starts the book by committing a crime (for the best of reasons, of course), so the hero had to be someone in law enforcement. I needed him to work on his own, and be able to meet her in various locations, but also to get assignments from a superior and be part of a larger organization. A little research uncovered the fact that his perfect job was as a field agent for a police violent crimes division.

With a little time and effort, your characters will land the perfect jobs, and you'll land the sale.