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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. 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 and in golf carts. She is passionate about learning.[00:02:00]
Sharing her knowledge with others through writers helping writers blog, and on one step for writers, we’re gonna talk all 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.
Okay, so the emotion of Thesaurus and the later came the emotion Apple hired. I think that came later. But also there’s these six other books. There’s together 10. Okay, 10 altogether. So there’s the emotional wound, thesaurus, the negative trait. There’s two conflict, thesaurus, there’s the positive traits.
Thesaurus, we’re all setting, urban setting. [00:03:00] I think I’m missing a couple. I don’t know. Occupations. The occupations. Okay. So how did you decide, so you mastered this and people were like using it and it was this. Overnight. Well, I dunno if it was an overnight success, but it was a success over time and you were like, all right.
How did you decide how to branch out and what topics to actually encompass?
Becca Puglisi: How did that all come
Suzy Vadori: about?
Becca Puglisi: Yeah, the emotion of the source really did kind of take off fairly quickly. I mean, I remember us talking, ’cause again, when we started, we were, we, we wanted to just go the traditional route. That had always been our dream, you know, to, to get the acceptance letter when we were writing our fiction and.
We started seeing as we were trying to get an agent so that we could get a traditional contract. We started seeing our content from the blog that we had shared, just popping up here and there on other blogs, and we thought, oh my gosh, somebody is gonna publish this before we’re able to get through the door.
So that’s when we decided to [00:04:00] self-publish. Didn’t you know, know how to do that again, this was back in 2012 when it was still fairly stigmatized and. A lot of negative ideas around self-publishing, but we, we figured it out. We put the book out there and we basically said to each other, you know, what, if we could just cover our costs, we’ll, they’re more excited.
And I mean, it just really did kind of take off. And so then we thought, well, hold on. You know, this is something that we had a problem with and realize other people struggle with. What else? Could we write about what, what else do we struggle with that other people might have a problem with? And the, the next logical thing for us was characters.
’cause you know so much of when you, when you read a story and it’s not quite right, it so much of it is something wrong with the character that’s not developed well or not really authentic or realistic. We thought, okay, well, you know, let’s look at character traits. And so we started looking at positive and negative traits and how they develop where they come from.
[00:05:00] ’cause that’s a big problem is people tend to just kind of choose traits and put them together. Maybe they’re things that they admire or that they like, or there are things that they have that themselves, but they don’t make sense together, or they don’t make sense with the character’s backstory. And so, you know, we wanted to look at where they come from and how they naturally develop and let.
Authors know about that so that they can figure out how to build characters that make sense. And then we talk a lot about how to show those dominant personality traits and show who the character is instead of, again, saying he was impulsive, showing that through the story. So that those were the next two books that that we published.
And again, it’s just this common thread with us of figuring out what, what do we, what help do we need that we can’t find? And trying to provide that help. And I love that you were just
Suzy Vadori: saying that people bring their own experiences to it, because at the end of the day, writing is always personal. And if it wasn’t personal.
Then you wouldn’t be doing it [00:06:00] because you wouldn’t feel that call. You’d be that person that says, oh, I’ve always wanted to write a book, and just never does it. If you’re doing it, it’s probably coming from somewhere personal. And if you haven’t examined that, step back and see, you know, I’ve, I’ve been sometimes, I mean, the first thing that I ever do with clients is ask them to talk about their why.
Why are you writing this book? Why are you writing this particular. Book, and this is from my mentor, Jenny Nash. Why are you writing this particular book at this particular moment in time? And if you can’t answer that, you’re never gonna finish it. By the way, I, but a lot of times people will be like, oh my goodness, I thought I was writing about, you know, Jimmy the Squirrel or whatever.
But actually that was my childhood. Right. And, and, and it sounds really cheesy, but it’s true because even. If you’re, and, and if you’re listening to this and you’re like, but Susie, you know, I write about serial killers. I’m not a serial killer. That’d be fine. Of course. It doesn’t mean that everything that happens in your book is.
You, but it is colored with your lens. Yeah. So whether it’s [00:07:00] something that you’ve done, something that you would never do, hopefully everybody listening to this would never become a serial killer, but something that you would absolutely never do. So you can see the flip side of it or something that you wish you’d done.
And again, I wish I hadn’t had. Sometimes an impulsive on the character is impulsive. Be. Now Susie is impulsive and she just use a serial killer. And now my example doesn’t work very well, but let’s just roll a bit per a minute. Something I would never do something I wish I’d done. Something I wish I’d done differently.
Something that you’ve seen other people do, it’s gotta come from somewhere. So even if it’s not your own experience, it is your own thought. And that’s so it does definitely come from somewhere.
Becca Puglisi: That’s where I think the more I study theme, that’s where I think so much of that comes from. I mean, we have, I have a whole ideology around theme and how we can better incorporate it into our stories and be more consistent with it.
And, and I, I think that a lot of us need that help, but I, I think that so often theme just, it just naturally comes out and that’s what you hear, you know? People are analyzing classic [00:08:00] literature and they would go back to the author and say, does such and such symbol this? And he’s like, no, I never meant that.
But it’s there, you know? And I think that that’s so common is the ideas that we have and the beliefs that we have and kind of how we see the world. Those bigger ideas, they do tend to come out in our writing. And a lot of times the stories that we’re writing are about those things without us. Really meaning to write them that way.
And I love that you ask your clients those questions because knowing that ahead of time makes the process, in my opinion, simpler and clearer because you know where you’re going and you know kind of what the story is about. And then revision is a lot easier because
Suzy Vadori: it’s more front of mind. It’s true.
And the more books that I work on with the more writers, and what I mean by that is multiple books with the same writer, oftentimes their views come through, even if their books are different. And on the serial killer theme, I have been working with a writer who writes about serial killers and he’s written urban fantasy about that.
And now he’s writing a [00:09:00] contemporary about that. But his view of the world it and that theme is often the same. And so even though he’s changed Absolutely. What? Everything about the books. That character development is often skewed in the same way, and it’s a cool, like, it’s a really neat way that he does it.
And I love to, I didn’t realize how much work you’ve done on Thieves, but that makes sense because we went back and forth on an article last year, maybe I’d written for writers, helping writers, where I am a writer in residence. But I love, love, love writing with you. And that particular one was, ’cause I flip everything to the reader’s perspective and instead of talking about theme and what the author wants, it’s like what do you want the reader to take away from it?
Yeah. What did you take away? Right. And so, and I love that and you gave me some like, Hey, this is how this ties into theme. And then we, we kind of collaborated on that part and tied it back to theme because it is themed, but it’s, it’s kind of the reverse of it, right? It’s, it’s what do you want the reader to take away and being aware.
Of what you’re putting out into the universe and kind of acknowledging it [00:10:00] and to hit people over the habit that you’ve got, you know, 80 to a hundred thousand words to show different pieces of that, both positive and negative. Like whether it’s the theme itself or the anti theme or the opposite of Right.
You know, like whatever that is. And that’s to reflect on that.
Becca Puglisi: I love those stories that kind of. They just explore the idea. I mean, they’re not telling you what’s right or, or the right way of thinking about it or looking at it. It’s, you know, when they’ve got an idea and, and they have, you know, maybe different characters that represent and have different ways of looking at it.
And the protagonist is being influenced by these people and eventually comes around to his own way of thinking. But I love that way of just. Putting it out there and looking at it from different angles and letting readers interpret from it what they wanna interpret from it. And, you know, they can come away with very different ideas, having read the same story because of their own, [00:11:00] where they’re at and their background, their own, maybe their, their moral code or, or you know, all of these things that play into all of that.
That’s always fascinated me. I really like that way of approaching theme.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, absolutely. And I think. Just being aware as the writer, because it’s one of the things that I see the most often where writers go kind of astray, is they have a really deep reason why they’re writing this book, and if they don’t acknowledge it or understand it, they might write a different book and then at the end of the day, they’ve written a book that they’re like, I don’t know if I like this book, or it doesn’t do what they wanted it to because they never stopped to think about what they wanted it to do.
So that’s a big part about being a book coach, is actually understanding what the writer wants. Like it’s not about cunning and me give you a cookie cutter template and here’s how you write a bestseller. I mean, there’s people out there that do that. That’s not my process and I don’t think it serves the writer very much at all.
And all of my writers, whether they [00:12:00] do end up being bestsellers and many you, or whether they publish it quietly and that’s what they wanted, right. Whatever their goal is with that book. They’re always excited at the end of the day because they ended up writing the book that they meant to write.
Becca Puglisi: Yeah,
Suzy Vadori: I love it.
I hold that beat to the fire on that like, well, that’s what you wanted to do. Are we changing? Not, that’s okay. You could change it, but just be aware that if you go down this path, because you’ve now listened to this writing advice on you know, how to write a best seller, you’re actually not doing what you thought you wanted to do.
Is that right? Anyways, we’re kind of off on a tangent here, but that’s good. Right. That’s a great, all right, so that was the negative traits, positive traits. What came next? Was it the emotional woo,
Becca Puglisi: the source or one of the others? Next? The settings.
Suzy Vadori: Okay. Settings,
Becca Puglisi: because there wasn’t at that time a lot of books about, about settings and writing settings, and we recognize that’s another area where a lot of people get tripped up in terms of either sharing too much or sharing [00:13:00] the wrong details.
Just as we started, as we were researching it, we realized, oh my gosh, there’s so much that you can do with the setting. I mean, it’s like, it’s not just, you’re not just painting a picture, you’re using it No, you’re not. Or shadow, or to characterize or to set mood or show contrast. I mean, like there’s so many things that you can do with the setting and it.
So much more meaningful and interesting for the reader when they subconsciously see that other things are happening with this description, you know that they’re connecting dots, and that’s what readers wanna do. They wanna connect the dots and kind of figure out how it all works together. And when we provide passages that could be potentially boring and they’re doing double duty.
It’s energizing for the reader and it’s much more interesting. And so that’s, we decided to do those two books and it was, oh my gosh, it was massive trying to figure out, narrow down the list. I mean, ’cause there’s so many settings that you know you can do and. And we wanted to go and see as many of them as we [00:14:00] could.
’cause that book is a little bit different and that the entries are, it’s all about using sensory descriptions to pull readers in and to make them feel like they’re right there and immersed in the scene. And so we wanted to visit as many of the locations as we could so that we could get those, you know, what does it smell like?
What does it sound like? What kind of tastes might there be here? And that was, that sounds so fun. It was one of my favorite books to actually write because my kids were, I was gonna say, I would. They were toddlers and probably they were like four and five. And I remember taking them, we went to the train station and we went to the marina and we went to the liquor store.
’cause that was on like sit here, Ken taping. I mean it was, it was so much fun just really looking and paying attention and getting into all of the sensory details in those places. I loved writing those books.
Suzy Vadori: Love those mundane places that you just put, I mean, the liquor store can be an adventure of course.
But I was just thinking if I was writing that [00:15:00] book or if that was assigned to me, I’d be like, well, now we’re writing about Hawaii. And parents, you’re absolutely right. And oh, to be a writer’s child. My kids know. ’cause we do travel with our kids and we always have, and one of the games that I like to play is, you know, they get to a new place.
We’re in a cab going somewhere or maybe a rental car. To get to our hotel and they’re like not loving life ’cause they’ve just been traveling. They’re exhausted when they were toddlers or in elementary school. And my game was always, I’m ready, look around what’s different from home, what do you notice?
Right. And it’s just something now they’re, you know, in their late teens. My oldest is 19 and I still do that with them and they’ll do it because they understand. That it brings them into the moment, like, like you said, these techniques can be used for so many different things. Yeah. One of the ways to interrupt their bad mood is to bring them back to the moment so that they’re not ruminating on, you know, how long it’s been [00:16:00] since they had a muffin or ing out of it themselves.
Right. Out of their, yeah. And get them out of themselves and be like, oh my gosh. Like, wake up guys. We’re in, you know, wherever we’re in, we’re in Europe, or we’re in this. Foreign country or we’re in a different city, what even, it doesn’t have to be that far. We’re in a different place and the trees are different and the the vegetation is different and the stop signs are different.
And like people like whatever, and they, they kind of know what to look for because they’ve done it so many times. And again, it’s practice. It’s practice. And what are the sounds and sites and what are the people like and what are they wearing? Is it the same, all the things? I dunno. I could, I could do that all day long.
Okay. So I love too that you talk about. It’s not just a, FAU is full of setting details, it’s teaching you how to use setting in an immersive way, in an interactive way, and in a different way that’s more creative because we’re not Spider-Man on the wall looking down and saying, well, there was a table.
And Suzy’s computer and the thing, right? It’s like [00:17:00] Susie adjusted the mic and it gave feedback, right? Like I’m interacting with the setting and Yeah. And so these books, not only do they have the, the source part, the dictionary, like whatever part, it’s not a dictionary, it’s a theus, but you know what I mean, the reference part.
But you also have classics at the beginning that explain these concepts and kind of give context for how to use them.
Becca Puglisi: We call it the front matter, even though that’s not technically the right word, but every book has 40, 50, 60, depending pages of instructive material on. This is what this storytelling element is, and this is maybe some wrong ways it’s been used.
Here are some pitfalls to avoid. Here are, here’s how you do it. Well, here’s how it can be tied into these other aspects of storytelling that you may not have, you know, made those connections. Psychology is, is huge. Not obviously in the setting books, but we’ve learned so, so much about psychology and, and writing the books because we [00:18:00] recognized early on that so much of this, what matters is that what you’re writing into your story, that it mirrors real life.
So the characters, they have to, you know, their character traits have to come from real places and they have to go together in a sensible way. Emotions, obviously, there’s a, a psychological component with emotions. Following a certain continuum, you know, so that you don’t get these big overblown moments that don’t make sense.
Emotional wounds was like all psychology, and we actually had that one vetted by a psychiatrist because we were so scared of, you know, not being a psychiatrist ourselves of, of not getting the details right. But so much of the books that we write are based in human psychology because we want. The things that we’re sharing to echo all around us and for us to be able to see in, you know, to, to use those techniques and create characters and stories that other people just feel are so real.
It’s like, it just, it’s familiar because I’m seeing myself in it or I’m seeing the [00:19:00] people around me, or, you know, the world at large and the culture and, and all of that. So, yeah,
Suzy Vadori: I love that you’re leaning into the psychology and that’s sort of where my. My experience has led as well is into the brain science, right?
And sort of right. Fascinating. And, and things like Lisa Cron and Wired for story, right? Like there, there is this link between psychology and brain science and writing, because at the end of the day, we’ve got this medium that is affecting people and we need to be careful about how we do that, but we also wanna explore how we can do that.
Yeah. And so, yeah, it’s, it’s a really, really neat thing. Okay. So you’re talking about front matter then the, the source fit. So how does it work? Do we read this cover to cover and then memorize it and use it? No. How does it work? Oh, no. We’ve actually had people reach them to us wanting
Becca Puglisi: to turn them into audio books and we’re like, what?
Oh gosh. Who was, listen to that. I don’t wanna listen to it. And I wrote it. Listen to listen it. I know it doesn’t make sense, but No, it’s not really, you know, it’s not meant to [00:20:00] be read, cover to cover, but we do, you know, most people get the books because of the entry portion because they, it’s got, you know, the emotion of the source and they wanna see the emotions, or they’re writing about a certain character that has a certain occupation, and so they wanna get the book so that they can read about that occupation and how to write it well, how to incorporate it, and all of that.
But the front matter is massively important because again, corrects misconceptions about that storytelling element, and it just expands and gives you more ideas about how that storytelling element can be written and used in the story to do so many more things than you thought that it was gonna do, though.
I mean, we always tell people to please read the front matter. Then use the entry portion as needed. You can use it, you know, if you already know what you’re writing about and you just wanna get to it, I mean, you can go right to that, whatever it is that you’re looking for, and get ideas. If you don’t know exactly, you can use it as brainstorming.
You know that you’re just flipping through when you’re [00:21:00] looking and, oh, that’s interesting observation. Or, well, I could do that setting. I never thought about putting my scene there, or whatever. So that’s kind of how we tell people it works best when you read the front matter first. Then use the entries, but of course you could just use the entries and, and get a lot of what you want.
Suzy Vadori: I was really quick to say no to that audiobook, and as you were talking, I could see it as an audiobook, and here’s how. Right, because it’s 40 or 50 pages is just probably only an hour, which is terrific. Right? So that 40 or 50 pages of matter, and then the rest is just on a PDF load, right? Yeah. Anyway, just a thought.
I would, I would buy all of them and I would listen to all of them in your voice telling, teaching me each of those things. I would absolutely buy those. So a different conversation because audiobooks are changing in terms of what types of formats they are, and certainly through Audible and other things, you can have a workbook that goes with it.
You wouldn’t wanna read out all of them, obviously. Yeah. But yeah, to have that one [00:22:00] portion of teaching in your voice, or Angela’s voice or whatever. And how did the conflict of the so come up?
Becca Puglisi: So we did emotional wounds and then we did occupations. And then at that point we’re trying to almost like plug holes, like Okay.
Yeah. So we talked so much about character arc between personality traits and emotional wounds and some other, the sources that we’ve explored that at the blog that we haven’t turned into books. But then we started thinking about plot. You know, we don’t actually have a lot of resources that directly deal with plot and so we thought.
Let’s look at conflict because conflict. Is needed in every story you’re supposed to have it on. Every page is the adage. So how do we, you know, how do we do that? So we just started exploring it and realized that it absolutely is a staple for plot, but that it also, it so much contributes to character arc.
It’s like everything comes back to character Arc with us, even when we don’t want it to. So we have two books because again, there were so many [00:23:00] conflict scenarios that we could have used. We just decided to do a volume one and a volume two. We broke it into categories. So we’ve got like a relationship conflict and there’s ticking clock kind of conflict, survival, life or death conflict and, and so you can kind of look and see the category that you’re looking for and see what might be there that’s interesting to you.
But it was, again, just really interesting once we started doing research and, and kind of figuring out where we wanted to go because it’s, it’s plot based, but it also, it’s character art based because the conflict that your character experiences. It’s gonna provide choice opportunities, and in those choice opportunities, they can go many different directions, but the direction is primarily gonna take them closer to their goal or farther away from their goal, closer to overcoming their fear or their fatal flaw or whatever it is that they are having to deal with and struggle with or farther away from dealing with it appropriately.
That was very interesting to see it tying in kind of across the [00:24:00] board in a lot of different ways.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So I have both the digital book and the hard copy of most of them. Probably I’ve got some holes. I’m seeing both. I, I see clients often. Sometimes I’ll say it to answer a q and a on a webinar or something, and then everybody is holding up their, the sourcers in the, like, they’re literally holding them up.
When I mentioned it, they’re like, I got that too. And I have all their cameras on and maybe people listening are like, oh my gosh, I have a short stack and maybe you’re missing a few. Go get them. But I see people, and this is not me, with the dog ear and like sticky note in and all the things. And I know you guys love seeing those photos.
Send those all to Becca and Angela. Yeah. Yeah. Seeing them. But yeah, all tabs. But I actually find, I mean, I do have the hard copies and many of them are signed. And so I’m gonna keep them on my special shelf where all the books are signed, but the ones that I actually use are the eBooks because I can search and I’m, I like to say I’m lazy, but I think I’m really efficient.
Right? Like [00:25:00] I’m looking for something in particular and then I can search on it. What do you, what do you recommend it? What? Lazy. It’s
Becca Puglisi: totally, it’s totally up to personal preference. I mean, we have the, the eBooks are really good because like you said, they’re hyperlinked, so you can flip. Immediately from, you know, with the entry that you’re looking at, click the table of contents, click the one that you want, and so you’re not having to flip through the book and find what you want.
Well, I don’t even do that. I just use the
Suzy Vadori: search function.
Becca Puglisi: Oh, well that too. So it’s just, it is very easy to get where you’re going if you have the audio book, and also you have it with you wherever you go. So you know, if you wanna go, you just
Suzy Vadori: said, you just said audiobook, I think you’re manifesting that this is gonna happen.
It’s coming soon. Becca just announced it. No, I love it. You’ve got it on your brain now. It’s happening. Won
Becca Puglisi: book. You know, if you are traveling, if you’re going to a conference, if you’re working at the coffee shop, you know you have it there on your computer most of the time, or at least on one Kindle.
It’s all, it’s all there instead. I think
Suzy Vadori: that’s it. I don’t, I don’t write, [00:26:00] especially not new drafts. I don’t write at my desk, so it’s never handy.
Becca Puglisi: So
Suzy Vadori: that’s awesome.
Becca Puglisi: Convenient for a lot of people. But then you have the people who they want to make notes and they want to, you know, the new idea that they have for that emotion, for their character.
They’re writing them on the page so that they’re adding to the list, which I absolutely love because obviously we can’t include every single thing on each entry. And so it just really depends on, on your, you know, your preference and how you operate, how you process.
Suzy Vadori: What I’m hearing is buy both. Buy all of them.
Go get them. The links will be in there. Alright, just before we go, um, we didn’t get a chance to get to this in detail today, but I wanna talk about one stop for writers, uh, because you also, I mean, I just love the way that you both think because. As you’re, you’re trying to provide as many tools for writers as possible, and your site one stop for writers is so cool with its story maps and scene maps and world building, uh, you know, the character [00:27:00] builder and the storytellers roadmap, all of those things.
What’s, what’s that site for? What’s it about?
Becca Puglisi: So I kind of look at it as the books have the information that you need and then one stop takes that information and creates tools out of it to help you create what you need to create. So we have a, a character builder there that I actually think unabashedly is fantastic.
I mean, I just, I’m sorry. I really
Suzy Vadori: No, I agree. And actually, I don’t know if you remember this, ’cause it was a lot like, when did this launch, I was a beta tester for your charact builder. Because, well, number one, because I’m fascinated by it, and so when I saw the call, I volunteered. But number two, in my former life I built software.
And so like I had, I was like the one like trying to break it. I was always trying to break it menzel’s like, ha, doing this, my, that’s like, she’s giving, she’s giving really specific advice. I’m like, I’m like it. That’s what they do. Anyways, I think it’s amazing. I’m a huge [00:28:00] fan. Keep going.
Becca Puglisi: Yeah. So it basically takes, it creates this, this tool where you can collect all the information for the various aspects of your character’s personality and backstory.
And it pulls from the information in all of our books. So there’s a, there’s a tab for, for backstory, where you can brainstorm the character’s wound, figure out what their wounding event is. Then look at the, the fears that are associated with it to figure out, okay, they’ve got this wound, so this, which, which of these fears that commonly go with this wound makes sense for my character.
And then the lie that comes out of that. It all ties together. And then, okay. And I’m gonna go to the personality tab now, and I’m gonna look at their personality traits, and I’m gonna figure out where their traits come from and which ones make sense based on their wounding event, what traits they might have.
And then there’s a motivation tab where you look at their outer motivation. What story goal might they be pursuing because they’ve got these problems and these issues. And then what is the interim motivation that they’re struggling with? They’re gonna [00:29:00] pursue this outer goal because they’re trying to fill this inner void and it, it’s.
Hyperactive and it updates whatever information you put in and choose for these different elements of characterization. It populates it into a blueprint for your character’s arc so that you can choose if it’s gonna be a change, static or failed arc. And then it plugs all of that stuff in there and just gives you like a three paragraph outline of here’s who your character is, here’s what happened to them, here’s their problem, and here’s their story goal and how they’re gonna solve it.
And it goes into the fatal flaw and everything else. So it basically takes, you know, like five or six of our, the sources, all the entries are there and you can, you know, look through and brainstorm and play with them and see what works. So it’s. Taking our book information and creating a tool that you can use with that.
We also have a a story map tool, you know, where you can map out your stories outline. It’s one stock for writers. Like that’s
Suzy Vadori: all you gotta remember, but check it out. There is a two week free trial so you can check it out and actually [00:30:00] your rates are super reasonable for the yearly membership. So highly, highly recommend it.
Here’s a tool and I’m gonna say this. This tool is for all you writers out there that tend to put all your backstory and your character development in your book and then have to pull it out later, this is a great way to put it somewhere where it’s not in your writing, right? Because then you can draw from it and draw pieces from it.
Like you’re not info dumping pages and pages of character development that you are like 500 words today. And now that re usable. Don’t use those words because you wanna pull them in one piece at a time. Do it over there in the tool. And then bring it into your writing later. I love that. Okay. Thank you so much for coming on today, Becca.
I’ve got a couple of quick fire questions to finish us off here. How long did it take for you to write the first book from that idea and the list to
Becca Puglisi: and being published? We started the lists in like 2005 just for our own writing, not [00:31:00] deadlines. And then in 2008 we added to them putting up one at a time on our blog.
And then in 2012, it took us about a year to take all of that information and turn into a book.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. While and which is, which is, yeah. It was a long pro, right. It’s awesome. So it was really honed. Okay. What was your first big break where you’re like, oh my gosh, this is happening? This is unreal.
Becca Puglisi: It has to be.
When we started exploring this, the source at the blog, and all of a sudden the blog just blew up. I mean, people, you know. We wanted to have people do something where people could come back each week and see new content. So that’s kind of why we went with it. And it just, every week there was just more and more and more.
There were people were telling their critique groups and their writing partners about it, and that was when we were like, holy in that girl, something’s going on here.
Suzy Vadori: Oh, and a million coffees later, right? Yeah. A ILE coffees later. Okay. What’s your best writing advice for writers? One thing.
Becca Puglisi: Oh, I will [00:32:00] say, I will say to take your time.
We are living in this new age where you can literally, you know, just press a button and publish your book. And I think that’s very, most often is a huge mistake, um, because a lot of times we’re just not ready and. It takes, what’s that? That saying that it takes 10,000 hours or a million words for an order, 10,000
Suzy Vadori: hours to become a master or a ma like a maestro in your field, whatever that is.
Yeah.
Becca Puglisi: And it’s very tempting to try to short circuit that process and shortcut to right to the end goal. But it is a journey. It is a process. You learn as you go and you only learn by doing. And so. Resist the urge to rush to the end and just take your time, study your craft, surround yourself with people who are in the field, maybe slightly, you know, at different, at different levels, but slightly ahead of you so that you can learn from them.
And just let it [00:33:00] take as long as it needs to take before you go that step. Because once you go and you’re putting books out there. Now it’s really hard to, it’s really hard to, to get them back and to get readers to pull it
Suzy Vadori: back. Yeah. And I mean, that’s why I love that question. How long did it take you?
Because yes, you could say it took you a year from, you know, when you, when you started writing the, OR decided to make it into a book, but it’s a lot of years of prep. Yeah. And they are amazing books because you went through that and because you got feedback and because you saw how people were using it.
And you honed it. I love that. Okay, where can we find you? Your books, your blog, the One Stop for Writers, all that stuff. We’ll put all the links in the show notes, but just let us know here really quickly.
Becca Puglisi: Yeah. Our blog is Writers Helping writers.org and that’s where, you know, we’ve been blogging since 2008.
There’s a lot of material there. You can search and find probably an article on a lot of what, what you need, what you have questions about. And then one stop for writers.com is where you can go to see all of the tools that we have.
Suzy Vadori: Amazing. [00:34:00] Thank you so much for coming on. I’m sure we’ll have you on again at some point, and thanks for doing what you do for writers.
Becca Puglisi: So glad to be here. Thank you so much.
Suzy Vadori: Thanks for tuning in to show. No. Tell Writing with me, Susie Vadori, I’ll me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving 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.
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