Hey, first things first, I love your blog and got so much helpful writing advice here, so thanks for that!
I have trouble finding interesting protagonist jobs in fantasy. I’ve read that interesting jobs can make characters more interesting and can influence the choices they make, the way they perceive their environment and so on. A great example might be Kaladdin the surgeon in Stormlight.
But from what I’ve found, it seems that jobs in fantasy either are overdone (farmerboy-hero, royal adviser, noble, warrior) or boring (seamstress, washerwoman). To complicate things, my female protagonist lives in a rural area where there aren’t many jobs in the first place.
Do you have any advice for me? Or are jobs overrated? :)
Maria
Hey Maria, thanks for writing in!
What kind of job to give your character depends a lot on what you’re trying to accomplish, so there are several ways to approach this. A few common reasons include:
Giving Them a Reason to Solve Problems
Your protagonist needs to be involved in the main plot, and it’s often easier to arrange that if solving the relevant problems is their job. If you’re writing a mystery story, you could create an elaborate justification for why Jane the Accountant has to investigate, or you could just make the story about Nora the Private Investigator. Same goes for other genres. If the story is about negotiating a peace treaty with the elves, your most obvious protagonist is the kingdom’s chief diplomat.
Explaining Why They Have Skills
Heroes often need specialized skills or knowledge to complete their story, and their job is an easy way to explain where that comes from. Do you need a hero who’s really good with a bow and arrow? Say they were an archer in the royal army. Does your plot require a lot of research? Then an arcane librarian is the job for you!
Giving the Character Novelty
Spec fic heroes tend to have jobs like fighter, pilot,* knight errant, battlemage, etc. This is often for good reason, as we’ve looked at above, but it does get a bit same-y after a while. It can shake things up to give the hero a less common (for spec fic heroes) job, which usually goes hand in hand with a less common social standing. Seamstress and washerwoman are both good picks here. In fact, the farm boy turned hero used to provide exactly this kind of novelty, because who would suspect a lowly farm boy of greatness? This doesn’t work anymore because we’ve seen it so often.
Giving a Character Sympathy
Finally, a lot of characters have jobs that create problems for them, something audiences tend to sympathize with. Often, these jobs are arduous, unpleasant, and underappreciated. Again, seamstress and washerwoman would both qualify. But you can also have a more prestigious job if it puts major demands on a character’s shoulders. Being prime minister wouldn’t normally be sympathetic, but it could become so if the character had to work unhealthily long hours to solve a major problem their country is facing.
Most Stories Mix and Match
When considering what job (if any) your character should have, you’ll often have more than one reason. In Way of Kings, Kaladin’s job as a surgeon gives him critical skills that he’ll need later when he’s keeping his crew of bridgemen alive. That same job also gives him a boost in novelty, as not that many fantasy heroes are surgeons. Of course, Kaladin has a second job of being the bestest soldier that there ever was, which is a lot more conventional. Oh well, can’t win ’em all!
For your situation, making your protagonist a seamstress or washerwoman could help create both sympathy and novelty. It’s less likely to give them useful skills or justify why they’re the one solving big problems, so you’d have to do some extra work in that department. Or you could always create a plot where clothes and sewing are super important, maybe as part of the magic system.
If that doesn’t interest you, there are plenty of traditionally cool jobs to pick from, rural settings or not. Outside of cities, you see a lot more hunting and trapping, especially in fantasy stories. Even small villages need a blacksmith, or your character could be a grizzled veteran who’s retired to their family farm, certain that adventure will never call on them again. If sexism prevents women from having those jobs in your world, you might have to get more creative, or you could consider whether you really need that sexism in the first place.
And, of course, your character’s job doesn’t have to be an important part of their story if you don’t see anything interesting to do with it. Just remember that you’ll need some other source of the qualities we’ve looked at.
Hope that answers your question, and good luck with your story!
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A job can also be used for explaining where does the character get their income. It makes more sense a Witcher type monster hunter, that makes a living out of it, than Supernatural ones, that live on the road and commit credit card fraud just to afford risking their lives to kill monsters.
Consider your character being a reservist.
Perhaps they grew up in a family with a long history of service, whether military, or law enforcement. Ever since they were little, they wanted to follow in their family’s footsteps and underwent training.
However, due to a “peace dividend” or economic reasons, there isn’t a need/budget for enough full-time soldiers or men at arms to net your protagonist a job. So they join the reserves, a militia that can be rapidly called up or deputized in times of need.
This would cover why your character has investigative or combat skills as well as why their day job is something more common. Perhaps this could even affect your overarching plot, i.e. central authority is too distant/overburdened/uninterested to actually field any soldiers/police in your protagonist’s hometown and it falls on them and their fellow militias to keep law and order or hunt down monster that threaten the township.
Most suitable jobs for characters either involve them being their own boss, and so being able to set their own schedule, or being paid to investigate the sorts of situations the character needs to solve.
Clark Kent, for example, is paid to investigate Superman sightings, so no-one thinks it odd he’s always out of the office when Superman’s about.
A regular nine-to-five job would be a major disadvantage – imagine trying to juggle work and adventuring, or having to allow the villain to get away because your boss is demanding you work overtime!
I’d say, subgenre would influence your choice too. Slice of life or romance fantasies would be more forgiving with “boring” jobs. With no big problems that shatter the world, you don’t need big jobs to solve them.
Is a rural area really job free, or is it just employment in the modern mould that is missing? In a pre-modern rural setting, most people work, they just don’t necessarily work for any one person, or in the same job year round, instead fitting themselves into the seasonal economy.
As for washerwomen and seamstresses, they aren’t necessarily ‘boring’ options.
A seamstress’s work encourages detail focus and good dexterity, but if they also weave then that might give them an ability to think about the bigger picture, or at least a useful line of metaphor for such considerations. If she maintains her own loom, she might have basic mechanical skills which could translate to such adventuring skill-sets as lock-picking. She would have a familiarity with fabric and stitching which would allow her to quickly size up the actual quality of someone’s clothes, recognising either plain-but-expensive garb, or flamboyant-but-cheap, and draw conclusions about another person’s actual means accordingly.
A washerwoman could have similar sartorial insights, and perhaps a sideline in alchemical soap-making, no to mention being yoked AF, because that is a demanding, physical profession.
Also, depending on your setting, any rural fantasy character could hunt for extra food or train with the local militia or for a feudal levy, explaining archery and survival skills, or some level of skill with a spear.
Also, as a plot entry, a washerwoman might be the first person to realise that the town’s heroic champion has been washing their own clothes in order to – not entirely successfully – remove traces of blood on the mornings after the mystery killer strikes. Is she the killer, or is ‘the undefeated champion’ simply trying to hide her own failed attempts to stop them?
I’d love a story about someone who does the dirty jobs for a city such as a sewer maintenance worker and then he/she/they going on some adventure through the sewer systems.
Also, an underwater welder is a profession and it sounds fantastic! please someone make a story about underwater welders.
Hmmm…. Rural fantasy setting…
I take it that the realm is some sort of monarchy? In that case, might your protagonist be a mid-level government official?
Perhaps a Deputy Forest Warden?
The responsibilities would be making sure people aren’t overhunting, overfishing, or otherwise taking too much from the forests and open lands. That might make them unpopular; but they’d also be the person called when animals are coming out of the forest and trashing people’s crops or property.
The job would come with a modest fixed salary, and would require them to regularly patrol a large amount of territory, and they would have intimate knowledge of the terrain.
It might sound like the typical “Ranger” character, but they’d have little to no military training.
In a rural fantasy setting, a Forest Warden (Deputy or not) might rather have to stop people from hunting in the forest (historically, hunting was only done by nobles in the times used for ‘rural fantasy setting’ and wardens or suchlike had to prevent poaching).
Yet, I agree, a person whose job it is to patrol the area could be a good one for any kind of story that demands knowledge of the forest, the general territory, or the regular animals and/or plants within. It’s also doesn’t require the regular ranger’s military background and might be open to more people.
Perhaps it’s one job on the way to becoming a ranger after joining the adventurer’s guild?
It could be. But if I look into the forest back home in Germany, the German Förster is not like a ranger, but more like a warden. Forest-caring, essentially.
In a ‘court intrigue’ – type setting, I thought of a queen’s or aristocratic lady’s private perfumer.
They’d have a certain amount of status among the other servants and ladies-in-waiting, wouldn’t be tied down to a schedule, or expected to be ‘on call’ to their employer. They can be out in the gardens or woods gathering ingredients (which gives them contacts with the gardeners and woodsmen), or dealing with merchants from distant lands and overseas for rare herbs, spices, musk and ambergris (so might know a smattering of foreign languages). Their herb-lore would give them contacts in both the palace kitchens and the local healer’s hostel.
Above all, they’d have access to a well-equipped still-room – the nearest thing available to a laboratory – and the skills to use it. I can see them becoming a confidant to their mistress, using their skills to detect poison and prepare antidotes, or identifying intruders by the traces of scent they left behind them…
If you have a medieval setting and looking for novelty jobs, just google forgotten medieval jobs. There are a ton of rare professions that don’t exist anymore and were very interesting. For instance, a reeve, someone who managed an estate for a noble, like the precursor of a sheriff.
One mediaeval job I’d never heard of until recently is a ‘quornpecker’. This was a specialist in refurbishing millstones; over time the grooves in the grinding surfaces of millstones would wear smooth, and the quornpecker’s job was to re-cut the grooves, and reset the millstones to the correct distance apart.
He’d have some skills in engineering, and since any one mill would only need his services every 5-10 years, a quornpecker would travel widely, from mill to mill. As an essential specialist, he’d be relatively well-paid, and enjoy some free time between jobs – giving him the opportunity to adventure!