By Ronald Munro Watt - 246 words
July 2025
Exercise: Describe a character doing a job that you have actually done at some point in your life. Now describe the same character doing a job that is completely outside your own experience. Which is easier? Which is more convincing when you read your writing back?
Unlike English students, Sean received no grant in Ireland to attend university. So, in the vacation, he took a job working in a pea-vining station in Lincolnshire. The work was hard with alternating 12-hour shifts, the nightshift starting at 6 PM, the dayshift beginning 12 hours earlier.
Sean’s job was to load the pea vines onto the elevator that then hauled the vines (and pods) into the rotating drum of the machine. Sean had to be careful: there was a cut-off lever to stop the machine if his clothes caught in the claws of the elevator. But Birds Eye Unilever required that all peas be frozen within 90 minutes of being picked so Sean had to work quickly.
“Be careful of the elevator Sean,” the foreman said. “Last year a man missed the lever and got eaten by the machine.”
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When he left university, Sean decided he wanted a career in travel and tourism. To obtain experience in the industry, he took a job working on a luxury cruise ship. He received a week’s training and then was allocated a job on a large liner bound for the Caribbean.
It was not long before Sean realised he was not suited to the work. He found he was constantly at the beck and call of tourists who often complained about trivial details – complaints about the ‘foreign food’ or about the transport arriving late to take guests to an evening function. But the main problem was passenger boredom.
Which is easier? It is easier to write about ones own experience. As the article pointed out, Jane Austen set her novels in a world that she was very familiar with. I worked at a pea-vining station. It no longer exists as new machines now do the job in the fields when the the peas are harvested.
Which is more convincing when you read your writing back? Again, the pea-vining work piece is more convincing because the author actually experienced the job of working 12 hour shifts in the open air grabbing pea vines and lifting them onto an elevator while trying to avoid an industrial accident. A popular song at the time was ‘A hard day’s night’ which seemed rather appropriate.
By contrast I have only experienced one cruise on an ocean liner, and that was in the Mediterranean where the cruise ship visited several Greek islands over four days, hardly enough time to get board or to be certain about the nature of customer complaints.