Publisher’s Description of The Occupation Thesaurus

What if you could fast-track the reader’s understanding of a character without chunky paragraphs of description that kill the story’s pace? And what if you could use a common element of daily life to explore story goals, relationships, themes, and even the character’s internal growth? You can. It’s time to activate the power of your character’s occupation.

Whether a character loves or hates what they do, a job can reveal many things about them, including their priorities, beliefs, desires, and needs. The Occupation Thesaurus will show you how a career choice can characterize, drive the plot, infuse scenes with conflict, and get readers on the character’s side through the relatable pressures, responsibilities, and stakes inherent with work.

Do more with your description and choose a profession for your character that showcases who they are, what they want, and what they believe in. With over 120 entries in a user-friendly format, The Occupation Thesaurus is an entire job fair for writers.

Rebecca’s Thoughts on The Occupation Thesaurus

As a writer of books for kids and teens, most of my characters don’t have careers. But I’ve found other thesauruses in Angela and Becca’s collection helpful, so I wanted to check out this new one. For a full list of their thesauruses, such as The Emotion Thesaurus, The Positive Trait Thesaurus, The Negative Trait Thesaurus, and The Urban Setting Thesaurus, look here.

The Occupation Thesaurus is very user-friendly. It starts with a discussion of how a character’s occupation can help to characterize who they are, give them certain skills and/or values, and relate to their needs and goals.  

Think about one of the first questions you’re asked by someone you meet at a cocktail party: “What do you do?”

What would be your first impression be of someone who said they were a kindergarten teacher? An emergency room nurse?

Even someone who tries not to stereotype people will get the impression that the kindergarten teacher enjoys spending time with kids and values education. The ER nurse probably has a deep knowledge of human physiology and first aid and is able to maintain control in stressful situations.

After a detailed discussion of how occupation can affect a character and their story, the thesaurus dives into a list of 124 occupations. For each, it lays out a description of the job as well as the training and skills that job implies. It then goes on to discuss traits a character with this job is likely to possess, sources of friction that come up in this occupation that might impact the character and their story, and the emotional needs a character in this occupation may have.

For instance, in the entry for Actor, useful skills, talents, or abilities include:

• Charm, creativity, good listening skills, the ability to make people laugh, the ability to multitask, photographic memory, promotional skills, public speaking skills, and wit.

Character traits for actors include being:

• Adaptable, adventurous, ambitious, bold, charming, confident, cooperative, creative, curious, enthusiastic, extroverted, flamboyant, and more.

Sources of friction for actors include:

• Working with pretentious or self-involved co-workers, too many actors competing for few roles or losing to a rival, blowing an important casting call, creative differences among co-workers, being typecast, and more.

This thesaurus will be more helpful for writers of adult books than kidlit authors. Still, the adults in kids and teens’ lives need occupations and teens have part-time jobs.

Teens also have job aspirations. What assumptions might readers make about a 17-year-old protagonist who wants to work for NASA? How can you, as the author writing that character, use or subvert these expectations to advance your story?

Reading The Occupational Thesaurus also made me think about how the teams, clubs, and hobbies of middle-grade characters fill a similar role to the occupations of older characters. They show their interests, allow them to develop certain skills, and say something about their personality and maybe their needs.

I’d recommend The Occupation Thesaurus for writers who want to dive deeper into characterization in their stories by choosing professions that highlight important aspects of their characters and make them three-dimensional. Also for using the characters’ occupations to create conflict or heighten tension in a story.

I received an advanced reader copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

The Occupation Thesaurus will be released on July 20^th. You can check it out on Goodreads or order from Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.

Interested in More Books on the Craft of Writing?

If The Occupation Thesaurus sounds like a book you’d like, you might be interested in other writing craft books we’ve reviewed on the Winged Pen:

Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum
The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi
The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass

Or check out this post where we talk about our favorite craft books including: Story Engineering, Story Genius, On Writing, The First 50 Pages, From Where You Dream, The Plot Whisperer, Story, Writing the Breakout Novel, and Plot Versus Character.