So my story is about a down on it's luck strip club. It's owned by a shady, prominent businessman who hands management over to a series of incompetent men who treat the workers badly and mismanage funds. Eventually, management gets turned over to one of the dancers who tries to fix the place but she doesn't have a head for finances so she enlists her estranged niece (or daughter, I haven't decided on that either) who just graduated from business school. This character, Wendy, is very Type A and conservative so I'm trying to figure out how I can make her agree to work for this strip club. So far the circumstances pushing her to agree are: desire to reconcile with her relative Job market is extremely competitive and needs a job to pay off loans becomes friends with dancers Are there any more suggestions as to how to flesh out these reasons?
There is a potential to make a lot of money! It involves the food/beverage and entertainment industries which can be challenging and makes for great real world experience. It combines not only being strong in human resources and employee time management, but also keeping profit margins in check for food and beverages. Lastly, it can be exciting to do. It's not just your ordinary 9-5 job.
I'd probably have her take the job for the money and end up as a dancer herself where she discovers she loves 'the life'.
I think the chance for Wendy to prove herself to her family and show herself to be superior to her aunt might be compelling.
I think points one and two are good enough reasons to get her in the door, so to speak. There's nothing wrong with the idea of "hey, I wanna' make friends with strippers", but if she's a Type-A who just graduated from business school, that's not going to be her motivator. A Type-A, freshly graduated is going to be very much in a "definitions" frame of mind. "I'm a graduate!" "People need to see me as a real adult now!" "I am going to change the world!" These are attitudes very common in young people in that period of life as they start to cement into place those dynamics and paradigms that they wish to use as defining factors; hence, I call it The Definitions. Making friends with the dancers, people who are perhaps living a very different slice of life than she expects to live all shiny and new from university, would be an interesting place for story, growth, and change to take place with your MC.
One thing to keep in mind is that Type A Behavior Pattern (TABP) is pop-psychology now, so somewhat debunked. Anal Retentive Behavior (ARB) is a Freudian throwback, still, for some very odd reason, it seems more viable as a personality descriptor. You may also wish to explore the Meyers-Briggs personality dichotomy structures. If your story embraces psychology equally or above the setting of the strip club, you might want to explore the personalities of the entire cast of characters. A good objective might be to depict the odd man out. By that I'm saying show the chain smoker of the dancers have a cardiac seizure while doing the pole dance thing. Have her characterized as a real slob behind the setting of the strip bar. Essentially, play the devil's advocate to the definitions of the psych community.
One thing you left out of your description is how Wendy did as a student. Did she excel? Did she get summer internships or work/study opportunities at top firms or corporations? Back when I was running a tax department, we sometimes used interns for support work as a way to scrape by when senior management was squeezing our staffing. I ask because if Wendy is (stereotypical) Type A, she was driven as a student, and if she was driven as a student then she would not only have high (read: corporate or Big 4 firm) aspirations but the means to accomplish them, and working as a strip club would not cut it. Any desire to reconcile with family would almost certainly be a secondary consideration to career advancement in such a person. I see several options, here. Start with her being a little less stereotypical. Maybe she had the desire for excellence but not the discipline. Maybe she changed majors part way through her college career, ditching (I don't know, I'm just making this stuff up) social work for accounting. Maybe some personal crisis intervened, causing her grades to dip or preventing her from taking that plum internship. Maybe (if she's the niece) she's become estranged from her immediate family and her aunt is an unlikely refuge. The possibilities are legion. I will strongly suggest that if you don't know anything about bookkeeping and basic accounting, learn. You will not use most of what you learn about it, but be conversant enough to be able to leave tidbits in the story so that the reader gets a sense of authenticity. I would also suggest that, with such a conservative person, you might consider making friendship with the dancers something that evolves over the course of the story, part of her character arc. Good luck with what seems to be a really interesting concept.
These suggestions are excellent, and should get the creative juices flowing. By all means, avoid stereotypes. It's a lot more fun to play around with people who do NOT do what people expect them to.
Strip clubs are not as low paying as you'd think. I knew a guy that was an accountant at a strip club/pornography production company and he made plenty of money - more than his corporate job that he had before. By the time the club closed, he was the top accountant raking in over $300,000+ a year. He was conservative as well. Went to work, did his job, but didn't bring it home with him. There were problems with his family though, who didn't really let their kids around him because he was a "pornographer," which he wasn't. In all honesty he had nothing to do with the dancers, actors, or anything related to the industry. His office was in a separate part of the building that didn't even have racy posters on the walls.
