There is no one way to write a book.
In the pages that follow, I present an approach to genre writing that has paid my bills and won me acclaim for the better part of twenty-five years.
Why do some imaginary people move us, inspire us, and change the world? Why do audiences spend time with your book instead of any other kind of entertainment? Why do you write this story and not those others? How much mental real estate does your work deserve?
I always tell my students: The secret of life is paying attention. I repeat that sentence like a creative mantra. It applies to love, work, play, health, education, sports, religion, art, politics, business, and every other part of living worth mention. You name it: the root of success, the right answer, the smart move, the best solution always comes down to attention.
If you want to know what matters to people, notice where they invest their energy, focus their resources, and spend their time. If something matters enough, you pay attention to it; if you don’t, it doesn’t matter to you.
As authors, attention pushes us toward meaningful specificity. Out of all the words available, we look beyond just some words to the right words. Writers pay attention so that characters can pay attention, so that readers will pay attention. We verbalize.
Your mileage may vary, but the principles do not.
Readers engage with characters because as social primates we’re wired to identify patterns and extract meaning from our environment to figure out what matters. The core of any story is the emotional ride it offers an audience.
This book explains my technique for story development through characterization that
• applies to plotters or pantsers in any genre at any level.
• provides tools and tricks with dependable, delightful results.
• requires no special knowledge, style, technology, or work habits.
• draws on brain biology, performance, and classic literary principles.
• taps your unique voice and verbal gifts to tell the best story possible.
Most writing guides look at structure and character backward: they start with garnish and peter out before they get to the entrée. How many craft books simply repeat lessons they gleaned elsewhere, undigested and unexamined? In the pages that follow, I’m offering something else.
Language is literally the key…putting the right words in the right order for the right audience.
No matter your voice or vibe, verbalizing your story will help you get the right words on the page. This book offers a new pick for an old lock, a simple, practical technique developed over years entertaining audiences for a paycheck. Verbalization uses language to tell your story so you waste less effort and find the right words faster.
To date, my approach to character and story planning has proved useful for a wide swath of writers—newbies and experts, plotters and pantsers, authors and industry professionals—in every popular genre and media. Regardless of your experience or intent, the techniques in this book can transform the way you craft your pages.
In concrete terms, this book offers theory, examples, and practical exercises. Since our topic is fiction, the majority of my examples will come from popular genre novels. We’re going to tackle story and character with a method that is specific, flexible, and fun to implement. F’realz.
Verbalizing your work will help you
• brainstorm and gauge potential story ideas before you invest time and energy.
• populate your projects with the kinds of characters fans crave.
• drive action, anchor intimacy, spark dialogue, inspire humor, and amplify the emotional impact of any scene.
• structure narrative, steer your rough draft to completion, and guide the revision and editorial process.
• pinpoint problems, pitfalls, and dead ends before they derail a project.
• clarify your story’s hook, pitch, submission, and promo package.
Not to sound like a deranged infomercial, but I believe verbalization offers a storytelling Swiss Army knife that slices, dices, spices, splices, and entices the kind of fans who line up the night before and champion your work to millions of new readers.
After all, a plot is only as thrilling as the people who populate it. A story is inevitably the record of someone changed by their journey toward happiness.
What is a person? Who matters? Why are we alive? What is happiness and who deserves it? What is good or evil, right or wrong, kindness or cruelty, nature or nurture?
Storytelling is difficult to teach because it’s bound up in our beliefs about humanity, agency, responsibility, and duty. It pivots on issues of fate and free will, honor and compassion, reality and illusion. Sidestepping the big moral questions in favor of Band-Aids and blandishments may feel easier-faster-simpler, but it also reduces form to formula and character to caricature.
Instead, let’s focus on what matters: to build characters who move people, afford them the attention they deserve so that your readers will do the same.
Caring about your story is the way you unleash captivating characterization, brilliant plotting, hilarious comedy, devastating pathos, scintillating dialogue, breakneck reversals, incendiary love scenes, spectacular worldbuilding, fascinating specifics, staggering creativity, and overwhelming emotions that change minds and lives. In other words, the moment you stop caring, you should stop writing because your audience will stop reading.
Paying actual, authentic, absolute attention is how we fix problems, show affection, develop virtuosity, and make the world and our lives better. Where and how you pay attention tells the real tale of who and what and why you are.
Writing guides occupy a strange place on any shelf. On the one hand, no one can teach you to pump out a bestseller, but solid craft can accelerate and elevate that process. What works for 98% of authors may paint you into a corner. Your voice, your muse, your process may resemble what other folks are doing successfully…or not.
There are forms, but no formula.
Prescriptive writing manuals seem pretty goofy to me. How-to guides for writers can’t “solve” writing problems or calm a writer’s anxiety, but they can aim the writer’s efforts with more joy and precision. I present everything that follows as practical suggestions based on my creative and professional experience digging in the word mines.
Some writing lessons can be taught, but most must be caught. Consequently, I’m writing this guide to share my own storytelling process in the hopes it will inform yours pragmatically. None of us tackle storytelling the same way. What follows is only my process and shouldn’t be taken as writ or cant. No two writers face the same problems with the same talent or the same outcome; I don’t believe in rules, but tools.
When exploring craft and art, the only rubric worth your consideration is the most basic: Does it get results?
The Live Wire Writer Guides grew out of a series of popular workshops I offer to professional authors, playwrights, comic artists, game designers, and screenwriters. I’ve written full-time for more than twenty-five years, taught almost as long, and write these guides as a cross-section of the lessons that have lit my path. I’m kicking off with a book on verbalization because I think it’s the linchpin of all life-changing stories.
You don’t need divine grace or fairy dust to tell a story properly for profit. If those things turn up, groovy, but as a working genre fictioneer you need a technique that will get the job done, rain or shine. When I get stuck, I lean on craft, and often that takes the form of books that offer answers like this one. What’s been tried before? Can I find a better way? How did someone else untangle the knot I’m facing?
Writing is an art and a craft. Supernal fire may scorch the page every time you put letters and words together…but it may not. Tough. Every time you start a project, you pray for miracles and take what comes.
Art and craft work in concert. Ideally they turn up simultaneously, more often their attendance is lopsided, subject to your habits and inclinations. Deadlines and duty wait for no muse. Inspiration and lightning strikes are all well and good, but you can’t rely on the off-chance you’ll be “in the mood” when pages are due. You cannot build a career on moods and hope. Your craft is what keeps you moving forward until art shows up.
I came to fiction from film and theatre. My experience as a performer, director, and writer in showbiz has colored all of my subsequent professional life. Additionally, for twenty years I’ve taught literature in a well-funded Classics department, which gives me latitude to explore obscure subjects based on my whims and obsessions.
What that means is I’ve spent twenty years gripped by the challenge of consistently capturing people on paper in a compelling way so folks will pay for the privilege of spending time with them. Consequently, I arrived in genre publishing with traction and a weird bag of tricks centered on how to entertain an audience.
Once, in my twenties, I watched a project turn to garbage in my hands. An Off-Broadway theatre had commissioned a play from me for actors I loved, but halfway through drafting Act I, I hit a terrible wall. Fat check. Big names. Huge deal. Nothing worked. Horrible…a gun at my head I’d loaded. I spent a summer locked in a gorgeous mountain house straining and sweating like I was giving birth to a cinder block. I was blowing a tremendous opportunity until that August when I dragged my paltry pages up to the Williamstown Theater Festival where my amazing cast reminded me: Stories need verbalizing. I found the right words and finished the play in a week.
In the end, what saved me and that gig was language.
Scripts live and die on the strength of their verbalization. Fortunes are made and lost, ditto. To make it into production, great stories must offer more than a pu-pu platter of traits or quirks or quips—they express something universal and fascinating about the human experience. To survive and succeed, scripts need to present their actors a healthy range of playable actions juicy and compelling enough to hold everyone’s attention.
Ditto teaching literature. Tackling the classics with modern students requires a certain improvisatory enthusiasm and awareness of why stories outlive their authors. Ruthless practicality drove me to develop an approach to story that helped me do the job credibly.
When scripting anything, I feel duty-bound to predispose every project for success by any means at my disposal. As a former schmactor (aka schmuck + actor), I know precisely how insulting it felt when a lazy, sloppy writer saddled me with a limp role or a crappy scene. Come hell or polyester triple-knit, none of my scripts were going to torture innocent performers with my laziness or ineptitude.
This decision was more mercenary than idealistic. Actors and directors demanded playable objectives, powerful emotions, and fascinating roles, so I ponied up. If I wanted my scripts produced so I could get paid, providing those things became my baseline.
I share my weird résumé not out of nostalgia or egomania, but because my approach to verbalization developed as a practical solution to a pressing need: unforgettable characters who turned up on cue and dazzled. Start with specific actions, and by default a story tells itself in the most fascinating way.
I’m a professional pragmatist; if something gets results, I’ll use it until I can replace it with a better option. Rinse, repeat. When I began writing novels, I differed from many authors because I’d worked so long in a sphere that actively fought against writers having cast approval. To sell a script to producers, directors, and actors, I needed more than snazzy backstory and appealing details. I’d spent decades building a storytelling toolkit that opened doors, made bank, and won awards.
My approach to story has its roots in British theatre and dramaturgy, which always found pragmatic and effective solutions within the text. That respect for the script appealed mightily to the storyteller in me, even when I was still a working schmactor. What I present in these pages doesn’t duplicate these techniques, but it shares their artistic and theatrical DNA.1
Language-based solutions boosted and transformed my showbiz career, and as I began to write full-time, I instinctively adapted it to the scripting process because it saved so much time and agita.
When I shifted from scripted entertainment to fiction, my approach to story and character came along for the ride, evolving to meet the needs of my new format. Even though I wasn’t writing for actors anymore, I still populated each story in a way that helped the reader cast it believably in their mind’s eye. My format had changed, but audiences still wanted an unforgettable emotional ride.
My approach isn’t magical, just a robust masala of observations and lessons I’ve gleaned from canny critics and grizzled colleagues. I can only take credit for synthesizing the ideas in this book over a few decades earning my crust in the arts. Above all, my methods are practical and pulled from my experience in the business of entertaining people.
For most of my career, I assumed everyone tackled story and character the way I did because it felt so logical. In 2012, I mentioned my verbalization technique offhand in a lecture I’d posted at Romance University that elicited an enthusiastic response, happy reposts, and a startling flood of correspondence.
Then at RWA’s 2016 conference, I gave a workshop on characterization with my friends Farrah Rochon and Kristan Higgins, each of us describing our personal methods. Attendees seemed flabbergasted by my approach, and the recording of that class went viral. Again, I’d wrongly supposed my verbalization method was relatively common. Writer groups on a couple of continents invited me to give in-depth workshops on my method. Those attendees urged me to write a book supporting it. Those classes and my students inspired this text.
Ideally, I hope my experience in the trenches can help you navigate your own creative process. In practice, I want these Live Wire guides to serve as an energy boost, a power outlet, a safe grounding, a fresh jolt…something you can plug into when you need a new perspective or a flexible set of tools.
Use what works, ditch what doesn’t.
The best lessons come from direct experience. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.2
Many, many years ago, a script I wrote won a schmancy award presented by playwright Edward Albee. The next day we sat on a panel and he kicked off with a softball icebreaker assigned by the event’s organizers: “How would you describe your job if you couldn’t use any word related to writing? Not pen or script, ink or stage.”
No way was I going to look like a plonker in front of the playwright behind Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. I’m not often at a loss for words, but that stumped me for a long, awkward beat. A bunch of cutesy answers crowded into my mouth, which I ignored, wary of Mr. Albee’s infamously sharp tongue. “Artist” seemed pretentious and “applause-whore” needlessly cynical. I flicked through all the weird chores I tackle when I’m telling a story, and then it came to me, almost by accident.
“Magpie.”
He squinted and then laughed back at me, nodding. “Exactly so, exactly so.” From that moment, his polite regard melted into warm camaraderie for the rest of that weekend. Apparently I’d spoken a password to some secret guild of which he was a member. For years after, every time we saw each other at retreats and openings, Mr. Albee would clasp my hand and say, “Magpie!” as if greeting a fellow wanderer. My professional code name! Well, I learned the lesson.
All artists are bold, happy scavengers, but writers possibly more so because our tools are common and the work is invisible. Authors are scrappy, curious, audacious, clever, ruthless, and a little suspect…everyone wants to do our job, but few work up the nerve. We’re a bold, odd flock, and we’re always hunting and pecking for any sparkly shard that catches our imagination and makes our hearts take wing.
Over the past twenty years, “Magpie” has clarified my career through darkness and doubt. When Mr. Albee nudged that word out of me, I was more right than I knew. Even with bright eyes and glossy wings, magpies starve if we don’t pay attention. We build nests out of junk and gems and then fly away when we lose interest. We take what we’re given and make what we must.
I hope this book will help you be an enthusiastic magpie.
Keep a sharp eye and a strong wing at the ready so you don’t miss what you mustn’t. Find your flock and avoid canny predators. And as your career takes flight, stick to the sky to scan the terrain, look for the bits that glitter, swoop down when you’re ready. Anything that sparkles is fair game…snooze and you lose, heed and you lead. Salvage what you can and share the beauty other folks abandon. Don’t just borrow what’s good…completely remake your gathered trash as treasure.
That’s craft. That’s art.
I always tell my students my only intention as a teacher is to offer a practical takeaway, some concrete solution, a spark to keep your wires firing. I hope some of these techniques will help you populate your pages more effectively, powerfully, and joyfully. Let’s all build characters worth loving and stories worth living.
“The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.”
Richard Peck3