paper heroes

So you’ve got a nine to five job as a traveling pet vacuum cleaner salesman. So you’ve got a PH.D. in abalone cage culture farming. So you’re  a telemarketer for a company that markets telemarketers to other telemarketing companies.

So, as a budding fiction writer, when people encourage you to ‘write what you know’, you feel like you’re at an immediate disadvantage. After all, nobody wants to read books about pet vacuum cleaners or abalone farming or telemarketers unless they too are pet vacuum cleaners or abalone farmers or telemarketers. You’d be much better off, you think, if you’d been a space astronaut instead, or a carnival fire-eater, or a wizard.

But it isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about adding an odd twist to the things you already do.

So you’re a vacuum cleaner salesman, but the mechanics involved in sucking up dirt and grime off pet fur isn’t necessarily the extent of your knowledge. You know what it feels like to have doors slammed in your face, to have people wanting you in their homes with about the same enthusiasm they might welcome Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Manson family.  Or maybe these potential customers themselves are crazy. You might have inadvertently knocked on the door of the town’s notorious cat lady. Or maybe you’ve stumbled into a house of bigamists. Or maybe you’ve done this for so long you start imagining what kind of people you’re about to meet before even lifting a hand to knock, like maybe they’re really reptiles posing as humans and this is a whole conspiracy to make Fox News believable.

Maybe you’re walking up to a mobile trailer blasting out Latin pop music and you’re expecting the person to open the door to be like Ricky Martin got hit with a pitchfork, and while I don’t know any good stories about heroes who look like Ricky Martin got hit with a pitchfork, it’s a good enough jump from ‘vacuum cleaner salesman’ to get ideas percolating. And this is just a small pool in a large ocean of possibilities.

Having a Ph.D. in abalone farming could mean you’re the expert when it comes to writing a thriller about deep sea creatures rising from the depths to attack a marine research facility. Or a suspense novel about company espionage when it is discovered fluids harnessed from a certain species of mollusk can give its user immortality. Or maybe your protagonist accidentally stole an abalone handpurse, and its vengeful mermaid owner wants it back.

But telemarketing is boring every which way you look at it! My best friend used to work for a call center agency. She had to politely respond to calls where the irate customer is anything but. She had to deal with stupid questions (“What’s a floppy disk? I don’t see anything here that looks floppy.”, “Why won’t my computer turn on? You mean I have to plug it in?”) with decent answers. Her phone conversations are recorded so her supervisors can look at the quality of customer service she provides, so no matter how many times the customers call her all sorts of names or send her death threats or claim alleged sexual dominion over her mother, she had to be nice. I would imagine telemarketers weather through nearly the same problems, and have just as much stories to tell.

But I’m just an accountant! In the IRS! That’s got to be the most boring and most hated job in the world! Since everyone equates the taxman to demons nowadays, how about writing a novel about a hero who works as an accountant for Satan? And this is just off the top of my head.

But I have a full-time job in financial investment and I only have a couple hours each day to write. I don’t have much of a social life, I work sixty to seventy hours a week, and there’s way too much thrillers about financial mismanagement nowadays that I won’t come off sounding original. What do I do? With that kind of schedule, you’re probably most qualified to write about something most people don’t often get to write about – insanity! And the good thing about insanity is that anything goes. Write about someone who wakes up one day and realizes he is the only sane person left in the world. Discuss.

It’s not about what kind of job you’ve got. It’s how you can take something that is ordinary and commonplace about your job, and make something unique and wonderful and funny and engaging and horrifying out of it. And of course – you have to love what you write. There has to be a compulsion to write this particular novel, not always because it’s what you know, but also because it’s what you must.

Many have already expounded on the “Write what you know” advice, but I’ll be one of the few to provide specific examples for how this works for me personally.

A case study: I have worked as a technical documentations writer who also oversees project quality control. I have worked as an events planner and marketing executive. I have worked in the IT department of a presidential campaign. My current WIP is about a horrible ghost with a centuries-old vendetta. (I pitch it as The Grudge meets Dexter.) So how did my previous jobs help me in writing this manuscript?

Because my first job was in a very old, almost flimsy building at the heart of a very busy and very modern business district, and you can tell the difference almost as soon as you step inside. Also, given my pale, long and unruly-haired, big-eyed and very Asian appearance, I have been known to accidentally scare people working overtime in other offices in this same building, especially when they wait twenty seconds in eerie semi-darkness for the elevator to light up, only to find me standing inside (my hair tends to fall over my face as I rummage around for things in my bag, a habit I have to check for anything I might have left behind at the office.)

Except this one does it deliberately, and I’ve never been koshed on the head.

My second job was in a warehouse-turned-office. To get to it, you need to go through a long corridor where sound carries loudly, and noises echoes frequently. Few co-workers were willing to stay long after office hours.

My third job gave me behind-the-scenes insights on politics, and I learned a lot about multi-layered antagonists from my short stint there (not only with this WIP, but with others I am currently working on.)

My first job gave me the premise for my WIP, my second taught me the importance of atmosphere, and my third taught me character development (with a fuller emphasis on villains). So it’s not all that far-fetched to take the odd things that happen in your life, spin them round, and incorporate them into story elements, even when the novel has nothing to do with your job.