Hi. I'm currently writing a novel, in which my MC just got a job at the finance department of a made up government. I want him to find clues for corruption within the state. I've already figured out the clues for him to start his investigation. The problem is that I need to describe his everyday work routine. So going through long lists of numbers, comparing the annual estimates of costs to the actual costs, etc. The MC has to do this for weeks without anything thrilling happening in the workplace. How do I describe someone's boring government job, without boring the reader? Or how do I show that this is a sisyphus task, which continues and continues, without mentioning the fact again and again? I need to get the atmosphere across but still have enough drive for the plot to continue at a good pace. Any tips are welcome!
You do it in an entertaining way. Did you see the movie "Office Space"? Yeah, it's a comedy but we laugh all the time that we know this guy has a boring job. Also, if you use First Person POV he could just tell us. Use his thoughts as he is doing boring things to get over the point he is bored to death. In the movie "Office Space" the MC goes to a hypnotist and asks "can you hypnotize me so when I am at work I think I'm fishing". His story sounds similar to yours, he discovers a way to manipulate money using the computers to make him and his friends rich by stealing one penny at a time from his employer".
Another movie example, I don't know if it was a book first, is the opening of the Robert Redford film, "Three Days Of The Condor". I think it was a book first, but book was Seven Days Of The Condor or something.
The banality of the mundane. I also thought of Office Space, Spinal Tap or Catch 22 and how an external observer could find the personality quirks, politicking and minor humiliations of the workplace as light comedy of the absurd.
Sounds like a good time for "tell, don't show". Actually SHOWING us something that's really, really boring would be, well... boring. So I think it's find to tell that it's boring, and maybe show the character doing some interesting things inspired by the boredom, but not to actually show the boring thing itself.
He drones on about the coworker who is on the phone all day with personal calls -- the lady who wears too much perfume -- the crunching he hears from the guy eating the crackers who leaves the wrappers on the counter in the break room -- the way Excel crashes on him every time he executes a certain macro, and IT won't fix it. Don't make or expect your readers to understand SOX requirements and quarterly budgeting. I like the comparison with Office Space, but the beauty of that movie was it made you feel the pain the Initech employees felt. Outside of TPS reports and "software", what did that company actually do?
Not to be pedantic (I realize you were being rhetorical), but I think they wrote software for credit unions or banks.
Think Walter Mitty. A boring life can be the springboard for humorous and outrageous fantasies. Every once in a while, pull your protag's attention back to the job at hand, until the next daydream abducts his or her imagination. Then, between musings, he realizes that there's something else tickling his brain. Something about the last group of figures he was looking at...
Yes, completely rhetoric, thank you, J.D. The company description for the Initech LinkedIn page (yes, they have one, not to be confused with Initech Solutions, a real company): "INITECH, Initech Software Engineers- An Office Space Fan Club - What's good for the company?- is a software company with a handful of ordinary IT workers who are fed up with their jobs. Also including office workers and white collar employees in general, with a boss VP Bill Lumbergh (everybody loves to hate) that has just hired two consultants to downsize the company." To clarify for O.P., my point in comparison with Office Space is the writers intentionally kept the work content vague and clearly detailed the reasons why the employees were fed up: copier that doesn't work, jerk for a boss, pending lay-offs, etc.). An occasional view of gibberish computer code and Windows 3.5-type file management screen shots are shown to illustrate, but the actual work content is practically never discussed.
