Jobs are as important for our characters as they are for real people. A character’s career might be their dream job or one they’ve chosen due to necessity. In your story, they might be trying to get that job or are already working in the field. Whatever the situation, as with any defining aspect for your character, you’ll need to do the proper research to be able to write that career knowledgeably.

Enter the Occupation Thesaurus. Here, you’ll find important background information on a variety of career options for your character. In addition to the basics, we’ll also be covering related info that relates to character arc and story planning, such as sources of conflict (internal and external) and how the job might impact basic human needs, thereby affecting the character’s goals. It’s our hope that this thesaurus will share some of your research burden while also giving you ideas about your character’s occupation that you might not have considered before.

Below is a sample version of this entry to help you see how an occupation can reveal your character’s beliefs, history, goals, and more.

To view the full entry, visit One Stop for Writers where it resides within the largest fiction-based descriptive database ever created. (Free Trial available.)

Occupation: Tattoo Artist

Overview: Tattoo artists are responsible for using needles and ink to tattoo a person’s skin. They may copy a customer’s design or render an original one based on what the client wants. These artists…

Necessary Training: While no formal education or training are required, most people begin their career working as an apprentice and grow their craft under the eye of a master tattooist.

Useful Skills, Talents, or Abilities: Good listening skills, high pain tolerance, promotion

Helpful Character Traits:

POSITIVE: Calm, confident, cooperative, creative, imaginative, kind, meticulous, patient, persuasive, quirky, responsible, sentimental, supportive, talented, tolerant

Sources of Friction: An indecisive customer who can’t decide what they want, overzealous health inspectors, a client asking for a design that’s offensive to the artist, customers with low pain tolerances, tattooing a customer who has self-medicated in an effort to proactively manage the pain, working for an unlicensed or unregistered parlor …

People They Might Interact With: other tattoo artists, a landlord, administrative personnel, vendors, customers,

How This Occupation Might Impact One’s Basic Needs:

Self-Actualization: Many tattoo artists choose this profession because it enables them to satisfy their creative needs. But this need could go unmet if …
Esteem and Recognition: While the old stigma regarding tattoos has largely gone away, there are still certain people and cultures who look down on the profession. This could be a problem if…

Common Work-Related Settings: Art studio, big city street, parking lot, shopping mall, tattoo parlor

Twisting the Fictional Stereotype:

Tattoo artists are usually fairly well inked themselves. But what about a character who couldn’t get tattoos due to a health problem but pursued the job so he could be creative?

Visit the other Occupations in our collection HERE.

How will your character’s occupation help reveal their innermost layers?

Much of your character’s life will revolve around their work, and whether they love it or hate it, their job is a great way to show, not tell, their personality traits, skills, work ethic, worldview and beliefs, and more, so we should choose it with care.

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