Show, don’t Tell Writing Podcast Show Notes & Links
- 📰 Sign up for the Inspired Writing Newsletter HERE
- 📝 Submit Your Page for our Show, don’t Tell Coaching Episodes
- 🌟 Leave a Review on Apple Podcasts (Thank you!)
- Intro and Outro Music is Daisy by Zight and used under a CC by 4.0 DEED Attribution 4.0 International license. For more music by Zight visit https://www.youtube.com/zight
Suzy sits down with Becca Puglisi, one half of the team behind The Emotion Thesaurus series of reference books to talk all things Show, don’t Tell! Learn about the Thesauruses and how they came to be, along with a variety of ways to use them to amp up your own writing. You aren’t going to want to miss this episode!
🌟 Grab your spot in Suzy’s Inner Circle for only $199 USD a month at www.suzyvadori.com/innercircle
Podcast Episode Transcript (unedited)
Suzy Vadori: [00:00:00] Welcome to Show. Don’t Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction nonfiction that are gonna wow your readers broken down step by step. We’re gonna explore writing techniques. I’m gonna show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers’ careers that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
And I’m also gonna coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you’re just starting out, you’re drafting your first book, you’re editing, or you’re currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show’s gonna help you unlock the writing skills that you didn’t even know you needed, but you definitely do.
I’m so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers, so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams, [00:01:00] and you’re gonna also have some fun doing it. Let’s dive in. Today we have an extra special guest. I was so excited to get to catch up with Becca Puglisi.
So much so that this episode is going to span over two weeks. So if you’re listening to one, make sure that you grab the second part as well. Becca Puglisi is an international speaker. She’s a writing coach and she’s the bestselling co-author of The Emotion Thesaurus and Other Resources for Writers. The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels.
Has like 10 different. You probably have, if you’ve been writing for a long time, you probably already have this on your shelf, so you’ll know that she knows her stuff. Her books have sold over 1 million copies to date, and they’re available in multiple languages. They’re sourced by US universities and are used by novelists.
They’re used by screenwriters, editors, psychologists around the world. We talk about all of those things in today’s podcast [00:02:00] and in golf carts. She is passionate about learning. Sharing her knowledge with others through her writers helping writers blog, and on one step for writers, we’re gonna talk about all those amazing resources in these episodes.
One Step for Writers is a powerhouse online resource for authors that’s home to the character builder. I’m the Storytellers Roadmap Tools, so you’re not gonna wanna miss this one. We talk all about show, don’t tell, of course. My favorite topic. And also you can figure out how these tools all came about, what her methodology is, and how she teaches writing, and where you can get them for yourself.
Welcome back. So good to have you on this podcast. It’s been a while. I know. I’m super excited. It’s one of those things where it’s been about a year since I launched the show. Don’t Tell podcast. I’m like, gotta get daa. I gotta get daa. And I know your schedule is just crazy. Right. And you were just talking before we started recording about the summer and the travel and all the things and
Becca Puglisi: [00:03:00] life.
Right. It is always, it’s just a ridiculous mantra that Angela keeps saying, like, when things settle down, when things get more reasonable and
Suzy Vadori: change, it just keeps going. I live really close to Angela and we are yet to, we I did, I did see her cross path long enough to hug. That was, that was good. But it was literally like a thing where she was being pulled in one direction and so, but no, it’s great to have you on the podcast.
We are here. It is such a good fit between your community. My community, we work with writers of all levels that just leveling up and helping them crack this nut of show Don’t tell Your books honestly are the main, oh, I mean, I recommend them the most to all the writers I work with all the time. The emotion thesaurus and all of its sequels and I just wanna share with our.
Listeners how this, like, how this all came about. ’cause your story is absolutely [00:04:00] fascinating to me. What made you and Angela come up with these really cool writers tools? Then we’re gonna talk about what they are and how they work and all that. What happened?
Becca Puglisi: It is a really cool story. Angela and I, I had, I was living in Florida.
She’s living in Alberta, so like very far away. Ended up on the same critique site, critique circle.com found each other amid like 10,000 writers. Just fell in love with each other’s writing and became critique partners. And as we were critiquing each other’s work and really growing in the very early stages of being writers ourselves, we, we noticed that our, our characters were always doing the same things.
Like my characters were always shuffling their feet and shredding their shoulders and hers were doing other things to express certain emotions. And we just were frustrated ’cause we’re like, surely there are other ways to show, you know, these emotions. We didn’t know what they were. So we started making these lists of, okay, here’s fear.
Here’s the things that people do when they’re afraid, or the things their face does or whatever, just to have like [00:05:00] extra options. And we shared them with the other people in our critique group, and we learned that like everybody has this problem at some point in their journey, they are stuck with not knowing how to show a character’s emotion.
It’s just the same things over and over. And so when we started our blog back in. Holy mackerel. 2008, we, we said, you know what? Let’s start with this. Let’s start with these emotion lists. We’ll create, we’ll call it an emotion thesaurus, and every week we’ll highlight a different emotion and see, you know, it people are interested.
And it just really took off. I mean, everybody really liked it. And again, it reinforced this idea of, oh my gosh, this is a problem everybody has. It’s kind of a universal thing. And there really wasn’t a solution out there. There wasn’t a book about it. And after a while people started saying, you have to make a book.
I need this in a book. And so we were like, okay, you know, we don’t know anything about that, but Okay. We’ll, you know, we’ll self-publish a book. I had, I remember I [00:06:00] had a, a two and a 3-year-old at home at the time when I was trying to edit the emotion thesaurus. And one of them was sticking a thermometer in my mouth and the other one was taking my blood pressure, you know, with the little toys that they were using.
Oh, right. I’m trying to edit, you know, I mean, it was just, it was chaos, but that’s how it actually got started. I mean, it started just from us writing ourselves and seeing a need for our own writing, and then recognizing that it’s a need that pretty much everybody has and finding a solution for it with the emotion to distort.
Suzy Vadori: When you talk about it being a universal problem, I mean, our listeners are gonna be nodding their heads along the way because at every point, every book that I write, I fall on these little crutches like, and sometimes my alpha readers are the best at pointing it out because I’ll also have some stuff and not worry too much.
Right. And they’ll be like, what is everybody’s eyes moving all the time and all you’re commenting is their eyes or whatever. And I mean, I even know better and all of those [00:07:00] things, but we have these crutches and they’re, they’re things that we insert, you know, like you said, shrugging the shoulders. And if you are aware of that one, you’re gonna cop with something else and use that over and over and over again.
So, yeah, and it was interesting because I was aware, I mean, Angela and I go to a lot of the same conferences. We, we live very near to one another, and so I was aware that this was happening at the time and I was like, yeah, but I could come up with these things. And then I didn’t realize how useful it was gonna be.
And then when I was speaking with one of my colleagues who is now a New York Times bestseller and all of things. She was like, oh my gosh, the emotion pau just like is makes, because I’m like, how do you write so fast? She’s like, well, I got mine emotion pau, so I know my right hand with all its tabs. And I’m like, just rocks through that thing.
And I was like, well, if she’s using it, like, because one of the things that I love, I’m, when I was looking at the questions, one of the things was, you know, is it cheating to use this, uh, on [00:08:00] your website? And, and, and it’s one of those things that comes up all the time. Like, I don’t need somebody else. To come up with things for me and, and so you have to address that because No, of course it isn’t.
Right. Well, right. What do you say
Becca Puglisi: to that? There’s kind of a common misconception when we look in it, when we look at our reviews, which, you know, is a little scary. Yeah. Don’t look at your reviews. I know most of the people who are unhappy with the book, it’s because it, it doesn’t have the emotions that they wanted, because, I mean, it’s not all inclusive, you know, we try to do the best we can, but.
We have to, you know, limit the size of the book, but there’s also people who are like, you know, it’s, this is too formulaic, and you’re, you know, you’re just now creating a list that now people are gonna be using that are gonna become repetitive, just like the crutches that people use subconsciously with they’re writing.
And really, it’s not meant to be a copy and paste resource. It’s meant to provide a brainstorming. Opportunity to just see what other options there [00:09:00] are. And we always tell writers to tailor the things in the entry to fit their character because even though those are things that are universally recognized, you know, as cues for, call it sadness, everybody expresses sadness in their own unique way and.
When you can figure out, okay, you know, the crying, you know, maybe I’ll use crying, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna show it the way that works for my character and that makes sense for my character and their personality. That’s the key is to not, again, just take stuff and plunk it right into your story. It’s to get ideas and personalize them to your character so they make sense for your character.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Because I work with so many, I mean, I work with hundreds of writers every single year, and one of the things I, I wonder if you’ve heard this before, you probably have, one of the things is I work with a lot of writers from different cultures and from different backgrounds, and so sometimes they’re like, oh my gosh, that is not what we do in Right.
In my, that is not how we cry. That is [00:10:00] not how, you know whenever it is. And so yeah, that’s one of those places where the basics are there, but absolutely adapt it. This is not meant to be. Yeah. For a descriptive, like, you must do it this way. There’s only one size fits all. Of course not. But I love saying this to my writers when I’m editing as well, I will often provide, especially around show tell, I’ll often provide examples.
It’s just my natural way to brainstorm, right? And so I’ll often be like, Hey, what if she did this? And I have to be brave as a leader. I have to sometimes be brave. No idea what their characters would actually do in that situation. I’ll make something up anyway. Right? And so I make up something with magic or with mushrooms or with who the hell knows.
And I put something down and I like to say to them, well, okay, if you love it and you love what I wrote and it totally fits, then great. Love it. It’s yours like as, as your editor. Anything that I contribute, you can have like, that’s fine. You don’t have to [00:11:00] recreate that, but if you hate it. And you’re like, Suzy, you’re totally out to lunch.
Sometimes that’s daughter because you’re like, oh my gosh, my character would never do that. And I’m like, right, I don’t know that because you didn’t gimme enough information to be able to guess. And so if I got this totally backwards and completely raw, then that’s an indication that you haven’t done a really great job of letting me get to know your character.
And you should maybe fix that, right? Well, yeah, for sure. And the source, Ries, I find are the same thing. They’re sort of prompts, right? Yeah. Make them your own, make them creative. Certainly don’t regurgitate what everybody, I mean, I don’t find, because every writer, we’ll get into this in a, in a minute. You guys have sold over a million copies of these, the authors in their wing.
That is insane. I love that there’s a million writers out there, or at least a million divided by eight if they’re all each buying all over the eight, there’s eight books. I think whatever that is, A million divided by eight. I should be able to do that math. But yeah, in my former career, that would’ve been second nature.
But [00:12:00] being a a coach, math isn’t as important. But yeah, there, there’s so many things out there that you can riff on, but they’re just for ideas. One of the other things that’s really cool about using this thesaurus, and what’s the plural for thesaurus? Is it thesaurus? I just, I just, the,
Becca Puglisi: the SOI sounds really pretentious to me.
It’s not a word I’m just gonna use, you know. So the, in
Suzy Vadori: the books, how about that? In the moon, that’s better. I love to, to share with people this experience because it’s actually incredible. One of the biggest ways that I use the books is if I think that somebody’s angry. And I look up anger. I think anger is one of the entries.
Am I get it wrong? Mm-hmm. Yep. Uh, anger. And there’s, you know, 10 pages or however many pages of suggestions and I look through and none of them are right. Instead of saying, oh my gosh, it’s not in the book, I realize, wow, she wasn’t angry, she’s jealous, or she wasn’t angry. She’s sad. One of the things [00:13:00] that we do as writers is it’s lazy, right?
To, to name emotions is kind of lazy. And it, you know, there’s lots of reasons to do that. And we, we get into that lots of other episodes, why we don’t wanna name emotions. There’s, there’s a actual physical reason or a chemical reason in breeders’ brains why you don’t wanna do that. Mm-hmm. Um, but yeah, I find that absolutely fascinating because we’re kind of.
Much in the way. If you say your character is angry on a page, the reader doesn’t engage. It’s happening when you’re a writer as well. Yeah. Oh, my character’s angry. Then when you look at all those bodily functions and all those responses, you realize that was wrong. It wasn’t the writing motion. Yeah. That happens to me all the time.
I
Becca Puglisi: love hearing how people use the books in so many different ways that we had never anticipated. I mean, it would never have occurred to me to use it as a check. Do I have the right emotion? Yeah, we, I mean, we’ve had people who in, we’ve had people, special ed teachers who will contact us and say, I use this with my autistic [00:14:00] students.
Oh, wow. To show them this is what anger looks like, this is what frustration looks like. You know, when you see these things on other people’s faces and that can show you what they’re feeling ’cause they’re, you know, have such a hard time reading those emotions. So that’s a really interesting way to, you know, check your own writing, make sure that you’re describing the right thing.
And I mean, so many emotions can be described with the same cues. You know, it’s very important to get the context. And a lot of people, I think, skip that because the emotion and you know, the important thing and they wanna make sure that they get it right. And then you end up with this kind of melodramatic situation where they’re really reacting and the reader’s like, what’s going on?
I don’t even know, you know, that anything happens. So the context is important to you to help you make sure you get the right emotion and that the reader gets the right emotion.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, and sometimes I find too. That it’s okay to tell, by the way. It’s okay to tell sometimes. Sometimes you can do both, right?
Because shaking, she was shaking. She was shaking with fear, she was shaking with anger, she was shaking with jealousy. She was shaking with rage. She was shaking [00:15:00] with, I don’t know what. Lots of different things. Yeah, yeah. Excitement. Sure. Those are all different and so sometimes we end up using both. It’s really important to use the show as well and maybe I’ll, I kind of glossed over it there and I probably shouldn’t because this is one of those.
Really cliche writing advices. Don’t name emotions that people kind of gloss over and say, well, why not? I’m gonna throw it over to you backhand, because I bet you have a really succinct answer. Or maybe not, but we’re gonna, why shouldn’t we name emotions in our box? What’s the problem with doing that as a writer,
Becca Puglisi: when you name an emotion, you basically are explaining it.
You’re telling it to the reader and telling, as I’m sure everybody who listens to your show knows, is that. Telling is, is is taking the, the reader out of the character’s experience and putting them at a distance instead of like walking through and figuring things out with the character and feeling the emotions with them.
They’re kind of, they’re put back and you’re just [00:16:00] talking to them. You’re explaining things to them. So they’re taken out of an active role in the story and they become a, a, a viewer of the story. And so it creates this distance so that they’re not immersed in the character’s journey. And that’s the biggest problem with telling.
So when we, we tell people, or we tell readers, you know, he was angry, instead of letting them see the anger developing and hear it in their voice and recognize with those physical cues, the vocal cues, even the internal cues, readers have felt that before. And when they see it happening, like in real time on the page, it creates like this.
Emotional memory almost at times when they have felt that emotion. It may not be the same situation, but they have felt the same emotion and it creates that connection between the reader and the character as they, they feel for them. They’ve been in that situation. They know that it’s uncomfortable if it something bad may be coming or whatever it is, and so that’s why [00:17:00] we.
Almost always. I used to, I’m guilty of, of saying, you know, never ever tell emotion if you’ve, if you’ve told, if you have the emotional word, then you have told the emotion you need to change it. And I think that’s not always the case now, but I would say most of the time it’s better to show, I think that when we tell an emotion, it should be careful thing that you have considered It’s the, the exception for emphasis
Suzy Vadori: or,
Becca Puglisi: yeah.
Yeah. Not just the way that it’s easiest to write. That for me is why showing emotion instead of telling it is super important, is because it keeps the reader really close and in the character’s experience keeps them immersed in the story.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, I mean, you’re speaking my language, Becca. You know me. I could geek out about this topic, walk me along, but I love hearing other people explain it.
Because, and I would just add to that, I mean there’s lots of studies, I’m all about the brain science and, and readers and how do we affect the reader. And so I love what you said about it brings them into the experience. It [00:18:00] kind of cues them to remember a time when they were there. And there’s lots of studies now that say that reading.
You go through all those same emotions or that same experience as if you were really there, right? Yeah. Like there, there really are cues and things that happen. It’s why we love to read. It feels like we did it right? Yeah. And all of that sort of connections in the brain are happening as if you’re really there.
The stress, the, the anger, the whatever that is. So that’s a key part of actually. Bringing us into that moment is to be able to describe it in a way that our body reacts and our brain reacts. Because if you just tell us the emotion, then we say, yeah, thanks. That’s a fact. And we don’t turn our brains on, which is what I was saying earlier, even when we’re writing.
If we just pick an emotion, we’re not turning on our brains. We’re not experiencing that either. Right? So going that extra step, especially in a, in a moment, and like you said, you can sometimes tell in this piece, [00:19:00] this is one of the ones that I almost say without exception, writers will often come to me and say, but Susie, like, Ugh, I just feel like I’m overdoing it.
Right. And especially newer writers. They’re like, I feel like I’m over expressing everything. ’cause it is, it’s uncomfortable. It feels strange when you first start writing that way. Am my Usually harder.
Becca Puglisi: Yeah. It’s harder. It’s takes more words. I mean, it’s, it is, it’s not the natural way that we would do it.
For sure.
Suzy Vadori: And it, it’s awkward, right? Because you’re kind of putting yourself out there and you’re drawing on your own experience, maybe sharing how you feel when you’re angry, right? Yeah. But the thing is like, tell them. Don’t worry, I will let you know when you’re over showing. This does happen, like after I’ve worked with a writer for six months or a year, I’ll get something and I’ll be like, well, now you’re like over showing, but it’s rare.
And so I can guarantee you if you’re just learning this technique or if you’re still feeling uncomfortable, you’re not there yet. You’re not over [00:20:00] showing there is room. And yes, it is harder. It takes longer, but it’s not harder for your reader. They’re not gonna feel like if you sat there and stressed over these three descriptive words, I can guarantee you they’re gonna digest it just as if you said anger.
Except in a better way. Right? Yeah. Like it’s not gonna feel clunky to them, even if it feels clunky to you.
Becca Puglisi: Yeah. And it just, it gets easier. It’s with any aspect of storytelling, the more you do it, the more natural it gets and the, the easier it is to see that line of, you know, what’s not enough and what’s too much.
And that’s where, I mean, you as an editor are critical. Also critique partners and beta readers. I mean, they were gonna let you know, oh my gosh, why is he going on and on about the way he feels enough already? I mean, they’re, they’re gonna let you know about that too. Or we don’t often have the perspective that we need.
So, I mean, I would always enc, I always encourage people to just do it and don’t worry about it being too much or not. Right. Because the more you practice, the easier it gets. [00:21:00]
Suzy Vadori: Absolutely. And I think, you know, that’s a really good point. For beta readers and critique partners, and it will show up in comments like this, whoa, this part feels really slow.
Right? Yeah. They won’t necessarily know why, but if we’re over describing and when we’re, I like to talk about show don’t tell as a Zoom lens, right? So you got this zoom lens. If you were the videographer and you’re filming a film, so when you’re showing something, you’re zooming in and when you’re telling something, you’re zooming out.
Yeah. And so you get to choose when you do those things. But when you zoom in to everything and make everything of equal importance, sometimes it’s overdone. Right? And so if you’ve got a, yeah, so the, the way to know if you’re, like, if people, if it’s showing up as, oh my gosh, this part feels really slow.
It’s probably because you’re describing in detail something that would be really interesting if it was like an actually important scene, but it’s not from waiting for a bus or whatever, and it’s not part of your plot. If [00:22:00] you’re zooming in on everything, then yes, it can get a little bit overdone.
Becca Puglisi: That’s a great point.
That it’s not always the fact that you’re showing that is the problem. It’s that you’re, you’re focusing on the wrong details or on too many details. And I, I mean, I see that I love, like, I like to read a lot of the classics. Gable’s one of my growing up, I mean, I read that whole series over and over again as a teenager.
I’m from like
Suzy Vadori: half an hour from there. So, you know,
Becca Puglisi: in my bucketing list it’s on my book,
Suzy Vadori: half an hour from the ferry, not half an hour from, but I lived on the main lap.
Becca Puglisi: I would get there over here, but I cannot read it. When I read it. Now I’m skimming. Yeah. ‘
Suzy Vadori: cause it’s so much
Becca Puglisi: upsetting description, you know, where it’s just, there’s so much.
And you see that a lot in the classics, because I don’t know that showing, you know, I’m, I haven’t looked into the research of it historically, but I, I, I don’t know that it’s been around all that long.
Suzy Vadori: No,
Becca Puglisi: and I think that’s, you [00:23:00] do get that overdone feeling now looking back at a lot of the classics, just because the way that they did it was differently.
Suzy Vadori: You do. And I think that deep perspective, you know, like writing in third person or first person, really deep like words of is new when even in the last, in a lot of genres in the last 10 years, that’s really changed. And so yeah. You talk about Tolkien or, or like any of these books that have these long descriptive passages and you’re like, yeah, now I’m skinny.
The, the thing is, is that reader’s attention spans are changing. Yeah. And so the science of it is changing as well. We have to compete with. AI and, uh, I mean AI in a sort of immersive perspective or. In an interactive perspective because now we can sort of load that in and really be a character and jump into a video game or something else and be immersed.
And it’s almost that kind of writing and that kind of feeling that we’re trying to capture now. And books are evolving and people’s attention spans are changing and it’s [00:24:00] unfortunate. Yeah. So it depends. I mean, you can still write a classic, you’re just not gonna find a very wide audience for it. So depends on your goals.
But yeah, anything, I mean. That’s a good question though. Are you finding that show, don’t tell in this sort of deep, immersive experience, is genre specific?
Becca Puglisi: That is a good question. I don’t know. I think that it may be that the deep immersive experience is better for characters who are navigating a change arc.
You know, if you’ve got static characters, maybe in an, uh, an action or an adventure, Indiana Jones aircraft, all of that, I don’t know that the deep immersive. Lens that zoom lens is, is necessary to get into the really what’s happening with them. There’s not a lot happening with them internally. I mean, they are having experiencing emotions obviously, and they’re going through conflicts and difficulties, but that inner journey is not there.
And so I think that maybe in those kinds of stories, it’s not, and I, I know it’s, it, I struggle with [00:25:00] it in difficult content. You know, I remember I saw this movie, oh, it was a very long time ago, probably. 20 years ago called Sleepers, and it was, uh, it was about children who were mistreated and it, it was just the, I came out of that movie feeling like emotionally just wrong.
And I, I’ve thought later as I looked back on it, it was too close. It was, it was the, I needed distance. The viewer needed distance from what was happening in that movie. And I think that, that you can, you know, get into the same. Problem when you’re writing a book, if you’re writing a difficult scene or something that has some uncomfortable content, things that you just don’t wanna explore too closely, it’s better to pull out in those scenes.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, I mean, I, I would bring up a second part of the question is nonfiction. ’cause a lot of times I, and I do have a lot of listeners and a lot of clients and writers that they work with who, who write nonfiction, both memoir and also business books and they kind of gloss over that show. Don’t tell part at first.
They think it doesn’t apply to them. What do [00:26:00] you think?
Becca Puglisi: I think that it, it works very well in narrative nonfiction. I think if you’re writing a narrative, nonfiction, if you’re doing a memoir, anything like that, I think that these techniques are gold because they, they do the same thing in those stories that they do in fiction stories.
They’re gonna pull the reader in, they’re gonna make the reader more interested. They’re gonna keep them invested. I do think that, you know, in a lot of nonfiction, if it’s more technical or more fact-based, you know, if it’s, it’s just a different style. It’s more of a reporting, a reporting facts kind of a style.
And it doesn’t really, and it’s not really meant for that kind of writing, but absolutely part of nonfiction. It’s, it’s, I think that’s hugely important.
Suzy Vadori: Nonfiction is changing as well. So there are reference books, I mean like the emotion au and it sequels, right? There are reference style books, right?
What’s more popular now is this hybrid style, which is part memoir and part prescriptive. Okay. And so. It has a lot of storytelling at the beginning. And so for that storytelling piece, so each chapter might [00:27:00] have a story from their personal experience, from their client’s experience, from a public story or some other experience.
And that piece still, it’s storytelling. You can absolutely bring it in. But then, yes, when you’re interpreting the facts and when you’re giving more facts and when you’re explaining, and the reference piece of that, or the exercises at the end of the chapter. Less important, the storytelling. Absolutely, because again.
It’s changing, right? We don’t, we as writers, we will look for reference books and things like that, but if you were a general population looking for a book, a self-help book on how to feel better or something else, we need that storytelling element to, plus, through that whole book, it’s a completely different experience.
We’re not gonna open up a psychology reference book and be like, okay, here’s the 10 things I can do. Right? Like, that’s not how we consume books anymore. So, yeah, so anyways, it does have a place I think, but you’re right in the reference piece of it, it probably [00:28:00] doesn’t, right? It
Becca Puglisi: does depend, I guess, on the kind, but I like your, the way you’re thinking in that things are changing and so why can’t the forms that have typically been somewhat dry and not very interesting, unless you’re totally into like whatever the topic is.
Why can’t we adjust the form and the structure and make it something that is a little more narrative and have more storytelling elements? I mean, this is why, you know, when you go to a lecture, you want the guy that’s telling jokes and that’s telling personal stories, and because that pulls you in and it’s, you’re connecting with that person.
So anytime we can bring that in, even in nonfiction, I think that, that, that would be great if it, if it works for what you’re writing.
Suzy Vadori: Thanks for tuning in to show. No. Tell Writing With me, Susie Vadori, help me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this [00:29:00] podcast and leading a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you’re listening. Also visit susie Vadori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you’ll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community.
If you’re feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page. If you’re writing that isn’t quite where you want it to be, yet for our show to tell page review. Episodes. Remember that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven’t even thought of yet, and I can’t wait to help you make it the absolute best you’re feeling called to write that book.
Keep going and I’m gonna be right here cheering you on. See you again next week.