The Work Of Fiction 📖
A season-based newsletter on what novelists, filmmakers and songwriters understand about working life - and what our careers can learn from them.
What is The Work Of Fiction?
Much career coaching and guidance treats your working life as a direction going forward, even if non-linear.
As someone who always has voices in their head narrating life as it goes, I wanted to ask what happens if you stop and look at it differently - the way a good novel looks at a life, a story you're inside, rather than a plan you're executing. The Work Of Fiction newsletter pairs 'seasons' of selected works with the career theories they quietly illuminate. Written for professionals who suspect the standard advice isn't illuminating, those who have outgrown LinkedIn 'high performance' updates, and the generally curious who want to think around their career and working life differently.A newsletter with a story to tell
The Work of Fiction is a newsletter built around seasons. Each season takes a small number of works — novels, films, games, songs — and reads them as career texts, pairing each one with the established theory it speaks to.
Season 1
Season 1 is Kurt Vonnegut. Six pieces, published weekly, on what his novels understood about belonging, agency, identity, loss and the shape of a working life. Later seasons will broaden to other authors, to films and prestige television, to games, and to the thematic threads that run across all of them.