thoughts, words, deeds

another definiton of me

Prompt: Do you find your work in real life, past or present, has affected your writing, positively or negatively, and do you use events from your work in your fiction or poetry?

A lot of my writing, both fiction and poetry, reflects my real life, including my work environment. I write about being a student and an instructor. I write about cubicles and working in the toy store. I write about frustration and working with difficult people and about children—a lot of my early work experience was babysitting and then nanny. I’m not sure I can separate my work experience from the rest of my life.

I think that work has to be something considered in writing fiction, especially when considering characters. One of the problems of category romance novels is that the main characters tend to have only nominal jobs that manage not to interfere with the real business of falling in love. It’s unrealistic and frustrating.

One of my professors when I was getting my MFA centered a course (it was a forms course) on work in fiction. We read novels and short stories in which work played a prominent role—a mason building a bridge, a porter on a train, a farmer—and studied how the work experience shaped the work, making the characters clearer and sometimes driving the plot. It was eye opening (I was introduced to one of my favorite short story writers in that course) and fascinating and now I feel the lack when a main character doesn’t have something in his or her life that focuses it. That’s what career does. It shapes the way a person thinks and gives them something that they’re doing all day so that their life is interesting.