Customer Reviews

Careers for Your Characters: A Writer's Guide to 101 Professions from Architect to Zookeeper

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book has positives and negatives. I would not advise using it in lieu of talking to multiple real people in the profession you are casting your characters. Having worked in a couple of the profiled professions, this book gave an outsider's viewpoint with some of the info downright wrong and some skewed. The occupation buzzwords given are strange: not the most common words and a weird assortment.
Positives: The chapter end references are useful. I liked the listing of fiction and nonfiction books using given occupations. The information given could be a starting point, but I would check everything with real people in the profession.

I picked up "careers for your characters" hoping that this book might assist me in fleshing out the backgrounds of some of my characters in my writing. While I enjoyed some excerpts, I found the careers mentioned weren't detailed enough to be useful. In particular, the section on law enforcement was pretty thin.

There weren't very many surprises either in the choices of 'careers' mentioned, except perhaps: sex worker, and even this 'career' seemed included more for prurient reasons.

Overall, it might be useful for those who know absolutely /nothing/ about the trade they are writing about... But for me I found it to be only an average resource - one I'll probably shelve and not refer to.

The book covers 15 professional fields: Advertising, Architecture, Clergy, Legal, Dentistry, Education, Firefighting, Journalism, Law Enforcement, Life Sciences, Modeling, Moviemaking, Politics, and the Sex Industry. Within each topic are some job descriptions, a bit of day-in-the-life, education, and salary. It's a pretty broad brush that might be okay for a short story or for a minor character, but there's nowhere near enough information for a fully-fleshed character in a novel-length work.

Personally, I would recommend looking in the Career/Job Search section of your library or bookstore, and at the government's Occupational Outlook Handbook. Information in these resources is often more detailed - career paths, personality traits, day-to-day tasks, etc.

Generally, I like Raymond Obstfeld's books, but this one just wasn't one of them.

I was excited to get this book since I'm bored with how often the same occupations are used over and over again in books. I wanted to be different. This book was a horrible disappointment.

The jobs are grouped by catagory and those are limited. Scanning the list, however, I was interested to notice they included smokejumping, a career I've used and heavily researched. I turned to that page to use the entry as a litmus test and was again heavily disappointed. The entry is accurate but misleading. It states that smoke jumpers earn "incredibly modest salaries" and that it's not a career for someone pursuing money. The fact is that, yes, their hourly wage is very modest for what they do, but the overtime is massive and they walk away from a big fire season with enough money to support themselves doing the things they enjoy for the rest of the year. It says nothing about the personality type who pursues this career (risk-taker) nor that it's a great job for a charecter because during the off-season you, the author, don't have to explain why the character doesn't have to report to some boring 9-5 job.

The only redeeming part of the entry is that it references some of the excellent source material that I've used myself, but that alone doesn't justify the purchase of this book, because any decent library will carry these books and probably several other excellent sources as well.

There is absolutely nothing in this book that you couldn't find doing a brief search yourself on the Web. I thought there would be some added insights, such as character traits attached to these occupations, etc., but there was nothing like that. And the jobs included are frustratingly basic. I needed to do research on three occupations--librarian; computer scientist, and doctor--and NONE of them was in that book. I was very disappointed.

There's not much in this book that a person can't also research on her own, but that's exactly the point of it: this time-consuming work has already been done and the results brought together between two covers. The result is a convenient resource and tool for inspiration for writers who need more depth for contemporary characters.

This book is a good starting place if you're considering one or a few careers for your character. If you find that the career is in this book (good chances are it isn't) then this is a good tool for the process of elimination. If you find after reading the entry that you're still interested, then secondary research is definitely needed. Occupational Handbook, The Big Book of Jobs, etc. offers really detailed info for just such a thing.
This one's good for a library shelf, but not your home library.

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, it's probably a duck. If a quick leafing through Careers For Your Characters tells you it is primarily yet another formula book, bingo.